


Kintsukuroi

by TehanuFromEarthsea



Series: Kintsukuroi, or, The Redemption of Kylo Ren [2]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Male-Female Friendship, Mentor/Protégé, Multi, Other, POV First Person, POV Third Person Limited, Teacher-Student Relationship, polyamory eventually
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-23
Updated: 2016-08-22
Packaged: 2018-06-10 05:30:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 42
Words: 108,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6941821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TehanuFromEarthsea/pseuds/TehanuFromEarthsea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rey went looking for a Jedi hero. But how could the defeated-looking man she found on Ahch-to help anyone? Does he really believe it’s Rey’s job to save the Galaxy? </p><p>Meanwhile, even on their remote planet they are hunted through the Force. Rey recognises the hot and greedy presence of one who pursues her: she has met and defeated him before. She and Luke are far more troubled by another:  a cold mind of brooding malice that seeks them both.</p><p>To what purpose? The answer is more fearful than anything they could have imagined.</p><p>And sometimes, it is the broken people who find the courage to fight evil.</p><p>*     *      *     *</p><p>Kintsukuroi (“golden mend”) is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery using lacquer resin laced with gold or silver.</p><p>“When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful.”</p><p>*    *     *</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Take it!

“Take it! Take it!” 

I hated it already, the greasy way it fitted itself to my palm. The little shock it gave if I touched the button that ignited it. The way it asked to be used. 

Luke didn’t take it. He just stared at me with a face full of grief. He must have known that only the worst kind of news would bring the Millennium Falcon here, piloted by a stranger bearing his old lightsaber. He didn’t want any of it, and I don’t blame him.

People used to joke that I can talk to machines, that they talk to me. This lightsaber talks to me too much. It’s more than a machine. I don’t want to hear it. Its song feels dirty to me. It is hungry for things I don’t want.

Then the look on Luke’s face! I don’t think he wanted to see me either. He looked at me in silence, with disappointment, and that space in my middle where I used to keep my family got even bigger. I guess I really am a nobody.

“Where did you get that?” he asked, after a long time. His voice sounded rusty. Like mine does, when I’ve been in the outer desert by myself for a long time. It gets hard to speak after a while.

“It was on Takodana.” I spoke slowly. I felt he might startle away, like birds do. Steelpeckers, for instance, that freeze and stare at you with their wild eyes. If you come too close they are suddenly gone in an explosion of wings. “A woman called Maz Kanata had it. Do you know her?”

“I know of Maz,” he said after a while. But he didn’t move. So here I was, still holding out the lightsaber. 

And there he was, not taking it. 

“You _are_ Luke, aren’t you?”

He nodded, grudgingly. So I ploughed on. I’d prepared half a dozen speeches in my head, but what fell out of my mouth then wasn’t any of them. 

“I’m here to bring you back to Leia. A lot has been happening and the Resistance needs you! The Dark Side is rising. Leia told me to tell you this: she’s fought evil with politics, she’s fought it with weapons, but she believes now the Force is the only thing that can win.”

“The Force,” he said thoughtfully, still looking at me from under his brows.

Then he caught his breath and his eyes widened as though he’d seen something in me he didn’t expect. 

“But look at you! How beautifully you’ve grown!” He made as though to reach for me, but stopped himself, looking away. “Even stronger than I might have hoped,” he finished quietly, talking to the ground.

“Do you _know_ me?” It made no sense. “My name is Rey. I come from Jakku,” I said.

“I know who you are,” he said quietly.

A kind of fury filled me then. _Everybody_ seemed to know who I was except me! Even Kylo bloody Ren seemed to know of me. And now _this!_ This tired, reluctant man, nothing like the the golden hero I’d imagined. The covers of the holovids I’d seen always showed him leaping into battle, bright and eager. A saber held lightly before him. _This_ saber, even. 

“Well _who_ am I, then? Because I don’t know! I don’t remember my family and I don’t know why I ended up on Jakku!” 

Except I was willing to bet it had something to do with the Force. 

“Your memory never came back, then.” He looked at me with such a weight of sadness that it sucked out every bit of hope I’d felt when I’d first laid eyes on him. “I was afraid that might happen. I am so, so sorry.” He passed his hand over his eyes, and I could see his mouth was trembling as he searched for his next words.

I had thought I was going to cry when I first saw Luke, but now I was angry. I didn’t need tears from him. I’d come a long way to find a hero for the Resistance. People had died, Finn’s friend Poe had been tortured, all so that Luke could be found. I had guessed, from Maz’s words, that he might have some link to my past, but I couldn’t have imagined anything as awful as meeting this sad man, almost undone with shame as he tried to speak. Even before he told me, I knew what he’d done.

I threw the lightsaber at him. 

He moved as though to catch it, then dropped his hands and stepped aside. The lightsaber landed on a rock some way away with a metallic clunk. We both winced. That’s the trouble with the lightsaber. It has its own ideas. 

“Why do you hate it so much?” he asked. Avoiding the harder topic.

“It tries to talk to me. But it’s done too much killing for my liking.” I didn’t think it was worth mentioning that every time I held it, I remembered when it flew into my hand the first time. Kylo Ren had stared at it with a kind of hot greed, and then into my eyes with a different expression. It makes me cringe to think of it, but I have to be honest with myself: he looked at me with awe. Holding that lightsaber turned me into something that he, the vile demon, wanted to worship. 

“You know I’m not pleased to see it back either,” he said heavily. “I’m just surprised you understood that about the lightsaber so quickly. It took me years to see it. Yet I don’t have to Force-read you to know that you are a warrior, Rey. Why then does it repel you? What are you, Rey?”

“You tell me!” I said, flinging my arms out. I felt like years of tamped-down rage were boiling over in me. I’d kept it tied up in a tiny knot inside me so long, as something useless to my survival. On Jakku anger would only have weakened me. Even now it was only derailing me badly. My mission was to bring back Luke, not to rant about my lost family. My lost memories. 

But the people who knew what had happened to me owed me a lot more than I owed them.

Luke sat down heavily on a boulder and patted the one next to him, motioning me to sit. Was he going to tell me something about the family I couldn’t remember? I sat, trying to keep the hope off my face. He fiddled with some grass and began to speak, not looking at me.

“Your mother’s name was Reyna and your father’s name was Arbos. Your family name was Merced. From Corellia. You had a brother, Rorran, about two or three years older than you. He came to study from me at the Jedi academy, which is how I came to know your family.”

Nothing. No light turned on in my head. My nails were digging into my palms.

“You say ‘was’ and ‘were’,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady.

Luke sighed. “I don’t know what happened to your parents, Rey. I think they got away safely.”

“Safely from what?”

“The attack on the Jedi academy. You were there, visiting your brother. Your parents were called away on business but decided to leave you there for a few days to spend more time with Rorran. The Knights of Ren flew in just as they were leaving, and there was a firefight. Here’s the thing though: your mother fixed racing ships for a living. She was trialling somebody’s speedster when the Knights of Ren attacked. There’s a good chance she outran anything they threw at her.”

“Didn’t my parents come back to look for me?” I said, feeling the sting of tears. Had they just abandoned me there?

“I don’t know, because I wasn’t there. The Knights had two targets: me, and some girl. I could read it in their minds. Snoke was after a girl.”

“Why?”

“I assume he has some precognition. Force-users often do.”

“Who was he after? How come I survived?”

“I don’t know, Rey. Nobody knew _you_ had the Force. What’s more, you had some ability I’ve never heard of before. Not only did you make people look past you without realising you were there, but you’d been concealing your Force powers for years.

“I was away from the Academy when Ben arrived. He asked all the apprentices to join the Knights of Ren or die. That set off a horrific battle, as you can imagine.” 

Luke sat for a while, lost in some painful memory. I waited. The whole story would come out now, I was sure. 

“Your brother said ‘no’ to Ben, by the way.”

I nodded. My brother was a hero, then. I didn’t remember the boy.

“I’d met you more than briefly too, when you were even younger. Only three or four. Your family came to stay with friends of mine so I could meet Rorran and see if he was suitable to train as a Jedi. I saw a lot of you, running about the gardens and generally raising hell. You loved to explore and nobody could ever find you! But I didn’t catch any sense of the Force in you. Your parents had no idea, your brother certainly didn’t, and I only realised it after I took you away from the Jedi academy.”

“You took me away?”

“To Jakku, yes, and as fast as I could. You were the only survivor, and once I realised you had the Force, I knew you might be the very person Snoke was hunting. I had to hide you where nobody would suspect your existence. Away from me, because Snoke was hunting me too.

“When the attack began I’d been away. I got a distress call….I got back a few hours later. Found my students gone. I searched the buildings and three of the Knights were lying in wait for me. I fought my way back to my ship, and when the fight was over, you just…called to me. With your mind. You’d been sitting there almost in plain sight, to anyone that knew how to look.”

Luke paused. He’d been picking up rocks and turning them over and over in his hands. Now he hurled one with sudden force, far out towards the ocean that spread out below us. 

“It was a hard, ugly fight that you saw. They didn’t die well. Not clean deaths. And you’d seen the students slaughtered, and I have no doubt that was even worse. Once we got clear of the planet, you broke down. You were absolutely hysterical with terror, and then you withdrew so far into yourself that you wouldn’t speak or look or eat.”

Luke looked me in the eyes at last. I could tell it took a lot of courage.

“I knew there was a technique…I’d heard it was possible to take away memories. During the trip to Jakku I tried it on you. I’m sorry. I didn’t know enough. I took away….everything. I’m so sorry.”

I swayed a little then, as though, even sitting down, I might fall off that bleak hilltop. Me, who has never feared heights. I looked at Luke’s hands, folded gently in his lap. Had he held them to my face, like Kylo Ren, and drawn the memories out? Had they gone hard, with a struggle? Or had they poured out like water, leaving me an empty shell?

“It was terrible, Rey. Like I’d snuffed out all the light. I wanted to take the pain out of you, but it went wrong….after I’d done it, I wasn’t sure there was anything left of you…but here you are.

“I hope you have been….okay,” he said to the ground after a silence. “I sense great strength in you.”

I bit my lip. I would rather have been weaker, and still somebody’s daughter.

“I wished I hadn’t done it,” Luke went on, his voice gentle. “But I didn’t know what else I could have done. One reason I came here was to try get rid of the kind of ignorance that could cause such harm. My ignorance.”

Looking around us at the rocks scoured by rains, the short grass hammered by gales, I saw how he’d punished himself already with this lonely existence. I couldn’t hate him. It wasn’t him that had driven me out of my mind.

“Tell me about my family. I don’t remember anything — what they looked like, nothing.”

“Your father was a quiet man and I don’t remember much about him. Nice man, though. Worked as a supplier fitting atmospheric system components or something. More interested in his home and garden than his work…I think your family had a small property somewhere on Corellia, not a big town. The whole family were really kind people. Salt of the earth. The Galaxy would be a better place if there were more people like them.” 

Luke stared off into the distance, trying to remember more. “Your mother ran a workshop repairing racing ships. Repairing anything, really, but all the race pilots used to come to her to get their ships modified and engines running in top condition. That’s how Han Solo knew her.”

“Knew her how well?” I said, before I could stop myself. Luke was quick, though.

“Not _that_ well. Han was a real charmer, but your mother would not have cheated on her husband. Besides, you look like Arbos, not her. Reyna was quite short and round, with thick blonde hair. Same nose as you though, and she’d wrinkle it when she smiled.”

I wasn’t aware of having smiled much around Luke. 

“I can still tell you one thing. You were a very loved child. They were good people, and you were the light of their life.”

The ocean I was staring at blurred and split in two. I was crying again. I would turn to water entirely if I stayed here much longer. Here on this lonely island with its endlessly roaring ocean and its crying gulls.

“I bet I hid the Force because I didn’t want them to send me away like they sent Rorran away.” That was obvious to me. Why would I want to leave my parents?

“Huh. I think you’re right!” said Luke. “But I’ve never heard of anyone that could conceal the Force from other Force-users like you did.”

“But we got split up anyway, so it was all for nothing,” I said. 

“Well, Snoke hasn’t got you, so that’s something,” said Luke. “You better tell me what happened with Snoke. And what Ben is up to.”

“He doesn't call himself Ben now.”

“That’s his problem, not mine.”

There was a bit of steel left in Luke, the way he said that. For the first time, I felt like smiling just a little.


	2. Chess Pieces

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Luke has a lot of news to catch up on. He has news for Rey, too.
> 
>  
> 
> * * *

But then of course there was the news of Han’s death and all that to tell. Now Luke was ready to listen, it felt like all his weight passed to me. He seemed to sense it.

“Let’s go down to my house first. You look cold.” 

“It was okay when I was climbing.” I still have trouble figuring out weather. On Jakku, if it’s daytime, it’s hot. I’d thought the snow on Starkiller Base was some weird white burning sand. This cloudy, windy, sometimes-sunny business was beyond my powers of prediction.

“The wind’s getting up,” he said. “I have some food. You can tell me the news while we eat.” He jerked his head at the lightsaber, still lying on the grass. “We’ll decide about that later.”

Yeah, nobody’s stealing that, I thought. I fantasised about handing the lightsaber to Unkar Plutt and getting paid so many portions that I could throw a party for everyone on Jakku that had ever been kind to me, before flying off into the sunset in my own ship.

Meanwhile I followed Luke down the path I’d come up. Something relaxed in my head as we got away from the lightsaber. Luke turned off down another way and we came to a cluster of stone huts built into the hillside. Water seeped into a stone basin beside a low door. A series of stone-walled terraces held tidy rows of plants. Plants for eating, I guessed. I’d always wondered where food came from.

We had to stoop to get in the door of his hut. Stupid design. That annoyed me. It must have taken months to pile up all the stones in that place, why do it wrong? 

But once inside, Luke’s hut was all right. He had tech where he needed it. He didn’t need much — just enough to cook and keep warm. In that way, it wasn’t that different to the AT-AT I used to live in. There were even a couple of padded benches ripped out of a ship, so it was pretty comfortable.

He offered me a bowl of soup. It was warm and full of salty, meaty chunks. Seafood, I learned later. It was good. I thanked him and didn’t say more. I didn’t know how to start talking about Han. The silence stretched.

Once I finished my soup I couldn’t put it off any longer. I tried to talk, but instead I started to cry. 

I know now that Luke could have just read my mind. But privacy is too important to Force users like him. If they didn’t contain themselves they’d drown in other people’s feelings and opinions. And you have to give people credit for what they hold back — if somebody has the good manners to keep their thoughts to themselves, then it’s not fair to dig them out of their head and then blame them if they’re not to your liking.

I wished Finn was there to put his arms around me and hug me until I felt better. I had a cold spot across my back where his arm wasn’t. Thinking of Finn made me cry even more, and then thinking of Kylo Ren nearly killing him made me angry-cry as well. 

All that crying took a while. Luke sat resting his hands on his knees and looking at them. 

Eventually I wiped my eyes and nose on my arms, and there didn’t seem to be any more tears. “I guess…you might have wondered why I’m flying the Millennium Falcon now. With Chewie.”

“Something’s happened to Han,” he said quietly at last. 

Then I was able to tell him everything that had happened. I started to cry again at the end, when I told him how much everyone needed Luke. How Leia missed him. How the Resistance hoped for his return. 

Luke was inching away from me, shrinking into himself. He held up a hand to stop me going on.

“The thing about the Force is, it gives you too much power. Power to do wrong even when you meant to do right. The right path is no easier to see for me than it is for anyone else.”

“But you can do good too with the Force!” I said. “Lots of good.”

“How much good have _I_ done?” Luke’s fists were clenched on his lap. “Ben’s parents gave him to me to look after, and instead I let Snoke destroy him! When I tried to heal you from the terrible things you saw, I destroyed you as well. Rey, I haven’t seen the Force used very well in my lifetime,” he said. “I honestly don’t know what a good use of the Force would look like.”

“That bit’s easy,” I said. “It would look like stopping Snoke.”

“If I couldn’t do it all those years ago, what makes you think I could do it now?”

“Everybody helping, this time. I don’t know, maybe Leia might start using her own Force powers. You won’t be left to do it all on your own.”

“And you? Are you in this fight?” Now at last he was looking at me. Those big, light eyes fixed on mine.

Nobody had ever really asked me that. They just assumed. So this was the big moment, where I had to choose. Fixing the Galaxy, or my own quest. 

Hah, me fix the Galaxy. As if! 

Oh, on my way to Ahch-to I’d daydreamed of going along on an adventure with Luke Skywalker. Helping him out. Watching him fight. Learning from him as he put the Galaxy to rights. Maybe saving the day at some crucial moment, because I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. Fantasies I’d enjoyed. 

But the fantasy crumbled in the face of this tired, reluctant man. While my family… I’d waited so many years for them. Surely it was time to stop waiting and start searching? I wasn’t a child any more. What if it was _they_ who needed rescuing, not me? 

“You have the Force,” he prompted quietly, when I didn’t answer right away.

Yeah, I have the Force, I thought. And it doesn’t even begin to fill the hole…I can remember I got that far in my thoughts before I was on my feet and shouting.

_“Everyone_ has plans for me, that’s clear! Even a complete bloody stranger like Kylo Ren did, and now you say Snoke does too. And who knows what other plans Leia has for me, when I get back? I mean, she _likes_ me, but she looks at me like a gambler who’s finally got the cards she’s waiting for.”

“Like you’re the missing piece that might win the game she’d been playing all her life,” said Luke gently. 

He must know that look, I thought. I bulldozed on.

“Was it ME you were waiting for? R2D2 didn’t wake up by coincidence when I showed up at the Resistance base. He was _your_ droid, with the map to you. _You_ must have had a plan, one that Leia didn’t know.”

“Not a plan, a Force vision,” he said grimly. “Eventually it guided me here to be safe. The ancient Jedis harnessed the Force to the planet’s own energies. All of it is cloaking us here. That’s why Snoke has never found me, and believe me, he’s been trying for many years. I just wish I’d known in time to bring you here too.”

_“‘Hide here’_ isn’t much of a plan,” I said bitterly. 

“Do you play chess?” Luke asked. I nodded. “Well then you’ll know the King doesn’t move much. And if you could hide the King entirely, your opponent would never win.”

“Did your Force vision tell you that in words?” I asked. “Because if you ask me, Leia’s the King. She does the strategy, she’s the piece that the Resistance protects. And she’s in hiding most of the time. You should take that lightsaber and your X-wing and be all over the board, mopping up the First Order.”

Luke looked uncomfortable. “Well, Snoke hides too, and it’s working fine for him,” he said. Which wasn’t much of an answer, I thought.

“What about Artoo and _his_ mysterious awakening?” I went on.

“Anakin Skywalker put a bit of kyber crystal in him. The same one as that,” Luke pointed outside, to where that wretched lightsaber was chilling on its hilltop.

_“WHAT!_ Who the hell puts a kyber crystal in a _droid?_ And what, _Anakin?”_

“He was Anakin’s droid, in fact he pretty much rebuilt him. That was Anakin all over. He tinkered with things. He would put a kyber crystal in a droid just to see what would happen.” 

“That’s crazy!” 

But radical. I wondered at it, against my will. “But then, Artoo was still powered down…”

“I was pretty much operating on instinct. I figured Artoo would wake up and know what to do if a Force user showed up, and then it would be time…” he paused. Time for what, I wondered. “… I never thought the actual lightsaber would show up as well,” he said, not finishing the thought.

“Yeah, that’s a mystery. Maz Kanata never did tell how she got the lightsaber. But Artoo! He _did_ know what to do. He came and got you. Now it’s time to go back to D’Qar.”

“Not yet! Not until I’ve seen what you’re made of!” Luke stood up, and somehow I could see the Jedi in him for the first time. Some kind of ease of movement in his limbs, a kind of purposeful power. “I know you are hunted, and I can’t let you leave here until I’ve taught you what I can.”

I didn’t say anything, and after a while Luke said gently, “What were you planning to do?”

I flung my hands up. I didn’t know. I don’t know. “Some days I think they can all get stuffed. I haven’t forgotten my family, whatever they all think. I want to know who I am. Even if they’re all dead, I still want to know!”

Luke took a deep breath and did something I could sense but not see. Some inward looking. Seeing something in the Force. Then he squared his shoulders.

“All right, I’ll go back with you. But not before you’ve had some training. Then we’ll go back to D’Qar together.”

“You want to turn _me_ into the White Queen,” I said. 

“It seems that way,” he said. 

The idea had no appeal. I have no hesitation about fighting people who are trying to hurt me, and now that I have friends, I am willing to fight for them too. But Queens don’t do that. Queens launch armies to attack a faceless horde of enemies. 

All people have faces.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Chewie owns the Millennium Falcon now. He’s agreed to help me search for my parents once I’ve brought you back to D’Qar.”

“Tell you what,” said Luke. “Send Chewie and Artoo to report back to Leia, and at least she’ll know you’ve found me and we’re both safe. Then get Leia to use her resources to search for your parents. If there’s a record of them, her people can find them. Stay and train with me until Chewie comes back with the results.”

So now we were bargaining. Something I’d done a lot of on Jakku. I didn’t owe a lot to Luke, the man who’d destroyed my memories. But he’d also saved my life, long ago, by hiding me from danger. Leia though… She’d want me to train with Luke. She had as much of a claim on the Millennium Falcon as Chewie did, too. If I wanted to fly round the Galaxy on my own errands, I needed to respect that.

“All right,” I said. Feeling like I’d cut a thread for good. But which one, the one to my past, or the one to my future? I guess that was the price of having friends. Before I left Jakku, I had only myself to answer to. Now I was agreeing to ensnare myself further in this Galactic war. Fighting for the Resistance was something I’d fantasised about once, when the monotony of life on Jakku overwhelmed me. But now I’d seen the reality. 

“Rey, I have a lot to think about,” said Luke. He started clearing up after our meal. “Right now I need to be alone to make my peace with Han. He was once my closest friend.” He looked over his shoulder at me. “Let’s meet tomorrow.” 

For a moment I saw myself through his eyes. It wasn’t only the lightsaber he didn’t want. He didn’t my big ugly pile of feelings either.

“Come down to the ship tomorrow?” I said. “Chewie and Artoo want to see you too.”

He nodded without much enthusiasm. I slumped on my bench for a moment longer, feeling defeated. I wished I knew whether I’d made the right decision. 

Luke stood up and opened the door. “Keep that lightsaber. I’ve got my own.”

“I can just see myself fighting Snoke with a lightsaber,” I said bitterly. “Is that what everyone is hoping for?”

“Not Snoke. Ben.”

“Kylo? He’s as dead as space dust. Vaporised.” I savoured that thought for a moment. Kylo Ren would have hated nothing more than for me to meet Luke. How it’d sting his enormous pride, to think of us sitting around chatting about the Force and the Galaxy together. I imagined his spiteful voice. _“You feel he’s the uncle you never had.”_

Though why Kylo’s opinions still bothered me I didn’t know. That’s one murderous scumbag I was never going to see again.

“Ben’s not dead,” Luke said. 

I must have looked incredulous, for he went on. “When he faced his father on the bridge, I felt it. He was making a play for the Dark. Or it was making a play for him. I try to avoid ever touching him through the Force but I couldn’t escape feeling _that._ It was chaos, Rey, and it _mattered._ Light and Dark, and pain…”

“You could feel when Chewie’s shot hit him?” I asked, wondering if I would ever have a hope of understanding the Force.

“That pain, yes, but also the pain when his father died. Ben was in agony.”   
“Sarlacc shit! It couldn’t have hurt enough for what he did!” Just thinking of it made my blood boil. 

“I felt it and I’m still feeling it. Ben’s not dead, Rey. And I’ve got no doubt he’s got his orders from Snoke by now. He’s looking for you.”

After that I needed the kind of hug that only a huge hairy fearless Wookiee can give. I hauled myself onto my feet and started back down to the Falcon.


	3. I Have a Teacher!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey thought it'd be a quick mission to find Luke and bring him back to the Resistance. After all, there isn't much on Luke's island besides Luke, is there? 
> 
> Turns out she's wrong.
> 
> * * *

I got the Wookiee hug I needed. Chewie’s hug felt like something warm from the childhood I don’t remember, as if my body were printed with memories my mind couldn’t hold. I’ve never asked if he’d been a parent, but it seemed to come naturally to him. It was a lot easier to tell him and Artoo about my meeting with Luke, nestled in the crook of his arm like that. 

It was hard to sleep afterwards, though. My mind was stirred up and clouded like a cup of Niima water when the pump’s taken up too much sand. Words and pictures from the day kept settling out randomly. I tried to remember my parents’ faces from Luke’s description, but it was no use. When I stopped thinking about them, then I’d think of Kylo Ren, still alive and hunting for me. An even more disturbing thought. I told myself to snap out of it. Remembering how the Force had flowed through me when I defeated Kylo. I was safe on this planet. He couldn’t find me.

In any case, Luke was going to train me. Even if I didn’t want to be anyone’s tool, it couldn’t hurt to know more about defending myself. 

All the kids on Jakku played “Luke and Vader”. We were always on the scrounge for good sticks and for pieces of cloth to wear as capes. For a few years when I was young there was quite a gang of us, of all different species. Everyone wanted to be Luke of course, but it was only fair to take turns. So our games would revive every Sith and Jedi we’d ever heard of, so everyone could play. I first got my quarterstaff skills playing at being Darth Maul.

We never imagined Luke actually existed, let alone that he was still alive. Alive, and aged. His hair grey, his handsome face lined and sad. Standing as though he carried an invisible weight around his neck.

And next morning, there he was, the living man himself. He surprised us by arriving along the shore, climbing over the rocks. He was holding two things I’d never seen before. Creatures. Shiny, metallic, yet soft. Sleek, streamlined shapes, obviously built for speed. Functional and beautiful. I had to touch them. Fish, he called them.

I know, I’m easily distracted. There was so much to distract me on Ahch-to, with all the green plants and small things that lived in them. So much life! Even in the sea, that breathed and sighed against the rocks. I had listened to it all night, waiting for the morning.

I think my admiration for the fish relaxed Luke, which was good. I was hoping to keep my feelings under control, for his sake. I wanted to show him that I wasn’t just a big ball of neediness.

Luke laid down the fish and I stroked their cool flanks while he stood patiently for a long hug from Chewie. Chewie’s voice was unusually subdued, almost crooning to Luke. Artoo had beeped and rocked with excitement when we saw Luke coming, but now he, too, was almost quiet. I sat back and watched the three of them reaching out to each other. Cautious. Testing whether their friendship was still there. Luke patted Artoo on the top of his dome. I could see that he knew Artoo was a person as well as a droid, and I liked that. Not many people can tell.

“Good job, Artoo. I think you did all right.”

Artoo burbled quietly. Something about being glad nobody decided to trash him for parts while he was on low-power mode. Luke looked hurt. “I didn’t leave you with just anyone. Leia would know better.”

Luke came over to me at last. “Let’s build a fire. You’ll need to know how to catch and cook these fish if you’re staying here.”

“I’m not staying long, I hope!” I said. The words fell out of my mouth like a brick. Rude. But the whole thought of delaying our return to D’Qar made me so anxious! Even though I could see the wisdom of staying to do some training, the feeling that I was needed elsewhere almost overwhelmed me. I was pointing and waving at the sky. “Leia needs you back there, with the Resistance!”

“Stop it. Please. It’s too early to fight.” 

Chewie gave a low growl at us both, agreeing, and shambled off to find driftwood for the fire. I was pissed off that he seemed to be taking Luke’s side. I’d rather get the arguing over with first. On Jakku it’s bad manners to share hospitality before you’ve settled your business. 

Luke insisted on showing me how to gut the fish. He threw the guts towards the sea, and shining white seabirds appeared out of nowhere. Their wings flashed as they snatched the entrails out of the air.

“They’re fast,” I said.

“They were waiting for me. They know I’ll throw them something when I have fish.”

I warmed to him more as I watched him looking at the seabirds the way I’d looked at the fish.

“Do you have a ship?” I asked.

“A ship, or a boat? I have a boat to fish with, in the next cove. I have my old X-wing too. It’s parked in the temple.”

“You found the temple then?” That thought lifted me up and I smiled at him like a gork. 

“Don’t get too excited. It’s not what you expect,” Luke said. So quick to tamp down any feelings! Was the the Jedi way? 

Fine. I’m enough of a Force-user to be sucked into everyone’s schemes, but not important enough to be told anything I want to know.

“I wasn’t expecting anything.” I hoped I didn’t sound like a sulky child. I turned my back and hopped over the rocks to the sea. Jumped away from the incoming waves, up and back down. I couldn’t stand still and wait for Luke to maybe, sometime, _perhaps_ tell me about the Jedi, or what he thought we were all doing here. 

Lacy ribbons of colour edged the rocks, flung this way and that by the surging water. “I know what that feels like,” I muttered to them.

Chewie howled for me to come and eat with them once the fish was ready. Luke handed me the fish rolled in a flatbread. It was so crisp! Its salty oil soaked into the bread. Chewie’s portion was gone in two bites, and that was with him trying to eat politely. He went back into the ship and came back out with a great big gaudy packet of Wookiee snacks. His favourite junk food.

“Oh, hey, those bring back memories!” said Luke, smiling at Chewie. Chewie grunted, scooped out a handful for himself and gave Luke the packet. Artoo made a farting noise. “No, they taste good!” said Luke, laughing. “Han and I used to …” But he was talking to Artoo and Chewie, not me. For a moment I saw that famous young man’s grin on his old face. Big and warm, and not for me. The three of them leaned together over Chewie’s snacks, talking, and I saw how much history they had together. Luke and Chewie and Artoo had been like family to Han for many years. How stupid I was to think that the few days I’d spent with Han meant anything. Han Solo was a sociable guy who had made friends easily. 

I envied how Luke was able to put aside his grief for Han’s death and their long estrangement before that. Now he was giving himself up wholly to his happier memories of Han. What mature people do, I suppose. Or Jedi. I couldn’t seem to manage it.

“I’ve finished. See you later,” I muttered. Luke must have seen something on my face. He looked stricken. 

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to….”

Chewie shot him a look and a growl that meant, “We can catch up later.” He put his heavy arm around my shoulder. Artoo twittered brightly at Luke, asking what his plans were for dealing with Snoke.

Had our droid just changed the subject to smooth over an awkward moment? People sure underestimate droids like Artoo. I petted his dome, the way I’d seen Luke do.

“If I knew how Snoke possessed Ben…” said Luke.

Chewie rattled out a long growl. Han had told him that Snoke was very good at finding a weakness and understanding how to use it. Especially with a young child.

Luke’s face mirrored the look of disgust in Chewie’s eyes.

I didn’t want to talk about Kylo Ren. I certainly didn’t want to find out that he deserved my pity. I started to say so, but Luke cut me off. “No, you need to understand who the enemy is. Somebody who could twist a child to his purposes, so subtly that none of us realised it until too late!”

“So how did he do it?”

“Ben used to suffer from terrifying nightmares. Now I’m pretty sure Snoke was able to get into Ben’s head and put the nightmares there. And then work on him to suggest that he needed the strength that only the Dark Side could offer in order to defeat those nightmares. That’s how he used the Force, to get inside Ben’s head. The rest could have been just manipulation, like Chewie said. Telling him he was superior to ordinary people, that nobody understood him except Snoke, that he deserved a far more powerful future than the one his family offered him.”

“So Snoke might not actually have great Force powers?” I asked.

Chewie quoted Han again. He believed Ben had more power than Snoke. Snoke’s trick was to make Ben so afraid of his own powers that he wouldn’t use them without Snoke’s guidance.

“Submitting his will to Snoke probably made him feel safer,” Luke said. “Whatever happened, he didn’t have to feel accountable.”

I must have looked puzzled, for Luke went on. “At the Jedi academy, he didn’t seem to know his own strength. He’d break things, hurt people. He seemed genuinely afraid of what he’d done. At first, anyway. Later on he seemed…proud of the chaos he could cause.”

“Snoke’s ideas,” growled Chewie.

“What does Snoke want, with all this power he’ll get from Kylo?” Somehow that was a question nobody ever asked. Probably because the answer was obvious to everyone except me. I asked anyway.

“Enslave everyone,” snarled Chewie. I tightened my grip on the arm still draped over my shoulders. He’d told me about the years the Wookiees had spent as slaves.

“Even without Ben’s help, Snoke has enough Force and cunning to get all the power he could ever need,” said Luke. “Unless a Light Force-user arises to oppose him. A Light-side Ben must have seemed like a threat he must destroy. And you too.”

The whole thing disgusted me. I couldn’t see the point of seeking all that power. Right then I was wealthy beyond my wildest dreams, licking the rich oily crumbs of the meal off my fingers and sitting next to a ship that could take me anywhere I wanted to go. Why should people be so obsessed with getting so much more of everything? You only need so much.

Though come, to think of it, our ship was stocked with three times more food than we needed for this trip, because I couldn’t be persuaded it was enough. Chewie had laughed at me, especially when he found I had yet another secret stash in my cabin, but I’d gone hungry too often to relax around food, no matter how much there was. Maybe great evils have small beginnings.

Artoo warbled a long, thoughtful comment in a mode I’d never heard before. Saying that Snoke was probably scared. Generally people who were scared did bad things as a result. Scared of death, usually. That was his experience.

Luke raised an eyebrow. “Quite the philosopher, is Artoo.”

Who was Snoke? The question on everyone’s mind, it would seem. Luke hadn’t found anything more than guesses during his years of studying Jedi history. Lots of guesses, but which ones were right? We all had more questions than answers, and we thew them at each other like a frustrating game of catch where we dropped the spanner more often than we caught it.

We gave it up after a time. Luke wanted to hear our news about the rise of the First Order and Leia’s life since he’d last seen her. He didn’t seem surprised that Leia had left the Senate. The faltering of the New Republic and the rise of the First Order seemed to be things Luke expected, even if he didn’t know the details. 

Chewie and Artoo did most of the talking. It was a lesson in current affairs for me, too. On Jakku, Galactic politics was a campfire tale that depended entirely on the teller; the truth of the situation was unlikely to come to our ears. Our lives revolved around the wrecks we scavenged, the storms that covered or revealed them, and the prices our salvage could fetch. The dwindling supply of unexplored wrecks loomed far larger in our minds than the enormous space battle that had caused them; that event, thirty years ago, formed the limit of our knowledge of Galactic history. 

I sat and listened, feeling like doors were opening all around me. The battle that created our Jakku junkyard was part of a larger picture; threads from that event led to and from other great moments in history. The way people came and went on Jakku, the things they bought, even the money or portions we earned, were affected by people far away. People greedy for power, pursuing a vision of the world that I could barely understand.

People like Snoke. The shadowy leader of the First Order. They followed him because they thought his power would advance their plans for ruling the Galaxy. But Snoke’s war on the Jedi and his promotion of the Dark Side pointed to some other interest. What was he doing?

The morning wore away. I heard dozens of names mentioned, all strangers to me. I had nothing to add, so I lay nearby with my nose in the grass. So many different kinds of green! So many different shapes! The wind sighed over delicate seed-heads. Luke absent-mindedly showed me how I could chew on them.

Afterwards Chewie and Luke walked off around the shore together to talk over old times. Artoo and I checked over the ship, making sure it was ready for the return to D’Qar. I kept looking sidelong at him as he connected up his dataports with the ship’s systems. This strange droid who had a chunk of kyber crystal in him. He could fry the ship’s systems and take the whole thing down, if he chose. On the way to Ahch-to, Chewie and he had told me stories about their adventures with Luke, years ago. It would be a mistake to underestimate Artoo.

“Artoo, when we were talking before, did you change the subject because you could tell I felt left out of your conversation?”

Artoo gave a sly whistle of acknowledgement.

“How do you know so much about people’s feelings? Oh, I know you’ve observed people for decades…but why do you care?”

People mattered, he said. It was in his programming.

“What makes droids loyal to people? To some people more than others? Like BB8 is to Poe, or you are to us. Do you choose?”

Artoo said droids like him and BB8 could sometimes choose what to do or who to follow.

“But why? Why don’t you guys run the world instead? You can hook into systems, override them, disable them…you can practically do anything. But you don’t, unless we order you to.”

A long, strange warble from Artoo, in that strange mode I’ve only rarely heard before, and only when droids talk privately with each other. I’m not sure I understood it. Something about humans making droids. We made them. Like gods.

“Pretty flawed gods, if you ask me.” 

We didn’t know the power that was in us, he said. He could only respect its mystery.

I lay back and looked at the white birds circling overhead, free of any philosophies beyond survival. “People think nothing of taking droids apart for parts or wiping their memories. It’s not right,” I said.

Again, that strange mode from Artoo. We who made them had the right to unmake them, he said.

It still seemed completely wrong to me. Was it only the droids’ own beliefs that kept them subservient? It went against all logic.

* * *

“Come on,” said Luke, shouting into the hatch of the Falcon. “I’ll show you the Jedi temple, or what there is of it.”

Artoo and I heard him from the crew lounge and left off playing pazaak, which was just as well. I think I was using the Force to cheat without realising it. I’m pretty sure Artoo was cheating some other way. 

Luke led us all around to the side of the island we hadn’t seen, talking as he went. “The thing is, I’ve never found what you could call a temple. I’ve come to believe the whole _planet_ is really the temple. The Jedi who lived here a long time ago believed in very different things. To them, the Jedi temple on Coruscant would be an abomination.”

Chewie made a questioning noise. I hung back and listened, since I didn’t have any idea about things on Coruscant. 

“The existing temple is all marble and luxury. No connection to the world of life, or to the planet. It sits on the top level of Coruscant’s wealthiest and most powerful district. Below it are a thousand levels of city, right down to the hard-scrabble slums at the very bottom.

“But here, the Jedi lived very lightly on the land and very closely with its living things. I’ve explored quite a lot, enough to know that they spent most of their time scattered over different islands and continents. This place, this cave, is only important because they kept archives here.”

This side of the island was pitted with wind-eaten hollows and caves. The largest one made a low-roofed cavern like a wide mouth in the side of the hill. Luke’s X-wing was indeed parked inside it. There didn’t appear to be room for much else. Some seating had been carved against the walls, facing outwards. So you could sit and watch the ocean, I guess. A few half-hearted stalactites hung from the ceiling. Small bat-birds had built nests among them. They flittered in and out above our heads.

Chewie made a disappointed moan. I wasn’t very impressed either. I’d expected golden doors, carved pillars, a glorious space built for gatherings of the wise and the reverent. Not this sandy scoop in a windy hillside. To be honest, the X-wing was the most interesting thing there. Chewie patted it affectionately and I climbed up and sat on it, looking into the cockpit.

Luke walked over to a section of the back wall. “Come and look at this,” he said. “This is where the ancient Jedi stored some of their knowledge. They came and lived on the island, and studied their records or wrote new ones. And then one day they left. I haven’t discovered why.”

I hopped down from the X-wing and went over to him. Just a rock wall. Lightly marked with carvings, if I looked closely. There was the outline of a hand among the complex figures scratched into the rock. Curiously I put my hand there. It felt like rock, grainy and cool.

“Reach through your hand with the Force. Open it.” 

As soon as he said that, it was so obvious! I could feel the space behind the wall, feel the rock delicately poised on a pivot, feel the lock and wards that held it in place. I laughed as I lifted the tines of the lock inside the rock door, and felt it yield to me in a way that felt friendly. Luke gestured with one hand, and the room beyond the door lit up to reveal row after row of shelves packed from floor to ceiling with every kind of book, slate, scroll, datapad and holocube imaginable.

And so started my apprenticeship with Luke. Not in a dojo, honing my fighting skills. But here, among the long quiet shelves of an ancient archive packed with knowledge of the ages. I could not have loved it more.

* * *

That still didn’t make it easy to say goodbye to Chewie and Artoo when they left, a couple of days later. I trusted them, but I didn’t like being left in the same position I’d always been: waiting for people to come back for me. I wasn’t so sure about being left alone with Luke, either. He was kind enough but he also seemed like he could disappear on me without warning. Off in his fishing boat, without telling me. 

“Go well,” I told them, taking a last Wookiee hug from Chewie. “And say ‘hi’ to Finn. Tell him I miss him.” My voice shook a little. A few minutes later, the Millennium Falcon cut a white streak through the unmarked sky, and they were gone.

Once they reached D’Qar, I imagined the search for my parents beginning, at Leia’s command, in some network of Galactic archives elsewhere. If they failed, I would take up the threads of it with the skills I was learning here, in the Jedi archive.

I learned to recognise a dozen styles of data storage and the ways to unlock them. I almost cried for the knowledge I’d never had, the things I would never have time to learn. The languages! The history! Working away at little nuts of knowledge, cracking them with translator pads to get at the meat inside. I had had no idea such things were possible. 

Sometimes I’d see the notes I’d scribbled on a pad, and a strange feeling of vertigo came over me. _Somebody_ had taught me to read and write, and doing so had given me the keys to all time and all the worlds. In those moments I loved that dear, lost person even more, and I had to wipe away tears before they marked the ancient scrolls I was poring over. 

Luke watched me with quiet pride, seeing me learn.

“My folks were good people. But with all that, I left Tatooine as ignorant as sand,” he said once. I laughed a little sadly. I understood him completely.

We weren’t just researchers either. Sometimes there was a moment of Force when something called to you, and you’d go along the stacks and reach in for the book you realised was waiting for you. Had always been waiting for you. 

Very disappointing when it was in a language we couldn’t crack. 

_“Talk_ to me, you stupid book!” I yelled the first time I found one of those. “Can you understand all these?” I asked Luke.

“Not all of them. The translator pad doesn’t know all the languages and I haven’t been able to learn them,” said Luke. I looked at him, and imagined him spending years trying to unravel the secrets of this library on his own. Knowing he was only scratching at the surface of something so enormous. It defeated him, and I knew another reason now for his rounded shoulders. 

“It must be very frustrating,” I said. Luke shrugged. 

“Some days are better than others. I make discoveries….” He pointed to a stack of books and holocubes on a low table next to a comfortable chair. I had made my own stack on a table nearby. 

Luke did teach me to fight, but it seemed almost an afterthought: something we did in the afternoons to work the kinks out of our necks and shoulders. I needed to feel the wind in my hair, and I came to love the dance of the lightsaber more than I would have believed possible. Learning came easily, and I lost my fear of the lightsaber’s voice. I learned I could dominate it until I felt nothing but joy from the flowing forms and poses and responses of combat. It was a pure pleasure to leap from boulder to boulder, lightsaber in hand, testing my balance high above the sea. 

Luke was beautiful to watch too. Age and stiffness fell away from him, and he let the Force guide his movements. I learned as much from seeing the rapt look on his face as I did from practicing the strikes and counterstrikes he showed me. Always calm, he’d give me the most beatific, childlike smile when I mastered a new skill.

But the bulk of my apprenticeship was the long hours I spent in the warm lamplight with the data-readers and books, following clue after clue like a patient gnaw-jaw on the track of some prey.

Snoke was our prey. Who was he and what were his powers? Where was he hiding? Did he have a weakness?

And so we studied the stories of notorious Dark Force users, of Siths and their apprentices, of Jedis who fought them.

“Everyone has a weakness, Rey,” said Luke, time and again. “Everyone.”

Including me, I thought. You wouldn’t need to search an archive to discover it either.


	4. Meditations on Snoke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Who is Snoke, and what does he want?
> 
>  
> 
> * * *

I kriffing hate meditating. Always have, always will. I’d spent years on Jakku staring into the emptiness while the hours crawled by. It never brought me any revelations. I’d rather keep busy. Busy puts food on the table.

It was a bone of contention between me and Luke. He argued that it would put me more in tune with the Force. I’d counter that by showing him some new Force skill I’d learned about in the archive. Once I knew something was possible, I’d fool around with the Force until I figured out how to do it.

Way more fun than meditating.

For a few weeks Luke had to be a bit gun-shy around me because I was constantly setting fire to things or seeing how many stones I could skip between his hut and mine. Probably only his own Force skills stopped him from being beaned by one of my less controlled attempts.

I’d swept out one of the huts near his, and moved my bedroll and clothes into it. Luke threatened to move to the other side of the island if I didn’t stop flying pebbles into his doorway. I said I’d enjoy seeing if I could do it anyway.

“Rey, you _need_ to meditate! You have too much energy!”

“I hate meditating. How about if I use the Force to weed the garden instead? That would put me in tune with Nature…”

That was nearly a disaster. We would have died of scurvy if Luke hadn’t stopped me in time. As it was, I was getting well tired of eating so much fish.

I was a bit obsessed with the garden, to be honest. The first time I saw how a seed had lifted its fat head above the soil I lay for an hour with my nose almost touching it, to see if it would move. When Luke told me seeds came up at night, I took to prowling around with a light to see if I could catch them doing it. The ravages of insects on our tender seedlings appalled me so much that I had to invent a Force shield to protect them. Luke’s smile when he saw what I’d done was sweetness itself.

But the Force-weeding idea wasn’t so good.

“Look, if you won’t meditate on the Force, at least sit and watch nature _work_ bit longer so you can understand how things fit together,” said Luke irritably, helping me restore order to the clods and greenery I’d thrown everywhere.

Nothing could have made me happier. I followed insects, counting their legs and admiring their wings and learning what they ate and how they made roads through the grass. I stroked the petals of the white and gold-speckled flowers Luke called sun-gazers, that I thought were much too precious to pick. Lying on my stomach I began to feel the planet itself, a great low hum of power, large and complex beyond comprehension. Happy, in some utterly alien way. I wondered what it was happy about. I asked Luke, but he just gave me an odd look and shrugged.

After that I started stealing time from my study of Jedi history to learn about living things. One holocube had a visual display that delighted me beyond anything. It showed, in a gorgeous swirl of colours, how life had spread and evolved throughout the Galaxy from the beginning of knowledge to the present. You could zoom in on any detail, trace the bridges linking similar species, or simply watch the larger patterns blossom and unfold across space. I watched it over and over, hypnotised.

“Is there a map like this of the Force?” I asked Luke. “Maybe we’d see it bloom and die away all over the Galaxy like a field of flowers, time and time again. If the histories are true, then sometimes the Galaxy is full of Force-users, and sometimes there don’t seem to be any.”

“Hmm, like a seasonal thing,” said Luke. “But I don’t think so. And if the Force has always been here, then we wouldn’t see it spread like this, either.” He pointed to the display.

“But some of the Jedi historians say it only exists because of living things.”

“And some say it came first, and life exists because of it.”

“Both sides sound just as convincing,” I said, pulling at my hair in frustration. “Those ancient Jedi sure knew how to argue. I’m tired of it.”

“Lunchtime, then,” said Luke. “Let’s do some sparring afterwards. Clear our heads.”

We sat on the stone benches in the shallow cave that made the archive’s front porch. The sea crawled below us in long pewter lines. Closing my eyes and leaning back on the rock wall, I felt my body hum with pleasure at the food I’d just eaten. I felt the sun-warmed rock behind me, and the planet humming with pleasure at whatever makes planets happy. The touch of the its star, perhaps. I reached out tentatively with the Force towards the sun I felt warming my eyelids.

Suddenly something dark seemed to shutter across the light, like a wing of shadow. I opened my eyes but there was nothing to see. But I could feel it still, in the Force. The light seemed to dim, yet there was nothing there.

“Did you feel something? See something, just now?” I asked Luke. He was rummaging in his satchel for the water bottle we always shared.

He looked up and shook his head. “What kind of thing?”

“Like a darkness. Not near. Passing quickly…” I tried to describe it, the impression it had made on me. “It was a presence. Something fierce. Hot.”

Luke’s face tightened with concern. “I sometimes feel Snoke hunting me. Like a cold wind, searching for a crack in the door, trying to put the light out. He seeks us, Rey. But what you felt sounds different.”

“Kylo Ren, then.” As soon as I said it, I remembered that burning look of his, as though I had everything he wanted.

“Don’t call him by the name he answers to. I’ve told you that before.”

I bit my lip. I had the feeling Luke was right. “I won’t call him anything at all,” I muttered.

*    *    *  
If I’d avoided meditating before, I was even less keen now, when it seemed that a finger of Force could reach out of the darkness and touch me when I least expected it. After that first time, I started to feel it every few days. It was horribly unsettling, like discovering that the empty room where you liked to relax was not empty after all.

If Luke couldn’t sense it, he could sense its effect on me, when the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. He’d look up from what he was doing and say quietly, “People have been looking for me for years. Both from the Dark side and the Light. We’re well hidden here.”

“How come I’m the only one that feels him?” I asked Luke.

“I guess because he’s not looking for me.”

“Well that’s just great,” I said bitterly. Luke looked up from some diagram he was studying and gave me a sympathetic look.

“I thought so too.”

“Ah well. In all the old stories, they say magic has a price,” I said. I sent a flick of Force to make the the lamps dance around our tables for a moment. “I can’t expect to have all this fun for nothing. I guess the price of having the Force is that I will also have that sad sack of spite dragging around after me.”

“It might not be all bad. Some day we’ll need to find Snoke’s physical location. If you can locate Kylo without him finding you first, that might be the key to Snoke.”

“I’ll try,” I said. I’m sure I didn’t sound very happy about it.

“Brave girl.”

“You think so? ‘Fake it till you make it’ usually works for me.”

Luke laughed, long and deep and surprising. “Hah. You have no idea how often I did that too!”

*    *    *

“Hey, look at this,” I said. I was watching a flickery old holovid that had fallen into my hands as if by accident when I was scrabbling along a top shelf of the library. Fell into my hands, with that twinge of Force I recognised. This was important.

“What is it?” asked Luke.

“Human sacrifice on Dantooine. Did you know they did that?”

 _“What?_ Not recently! That must be pretty old.” Luke looked over my shoulder for a minute. “Going by the architecture, could be a thousand years ago.” The buildings looked like stone. Heavily carved towers crowded around a long plaza teeming with people. Of course, nothing in this long-abandoned library would be from recent times, so a thousand years was a safe bet.

“There’s no date on it,” I mumbled, caught up in what I could see. A procession. The victims were ceremonially bound to great wooden sunbursts. The crowds were screaming, weeping, laughing, throwing flowers that were trodden underfoot.

“I can make out that slogan,” said Luke, pointing to a huge graphic painted on another sunburst disc hanging from the tallest tower. The victims were being carried up some steps to a plinth below it.

“What does it say?”

“Something about the end of troubles, welcome to the new life.”

I punched a button to freeze the holovid. I didn’t want to see the next part again, anyhow. I pointed to a cluster of people in ceremonial robes who had come into view, carried shoulder-high on ornate palanquins.

“There!” I said, pointing to a tall blue figure among the ceremonial party. Skeletally thin, and sporting a crest of white hair. An alien race I’d never seen before. He was holding a golden sceptre of some kind. “Get your holo of Snoke.”

“You think? Snoke’s not blue, and he’s hairless in all the vids I’ve seen.”

“So he’s older now. Maybe his species fades and loses its hair when they age. That creature looks to be in its prime.”

Luke brought over a little holocube of Snoke. Comparing the two images, it seemed possible that one was a younger version of the other.

“What were you searching for?” he asked.

“Maybe he feeds on pain. I looked for massacres, and the library directed me to sacrifices. You know how weird the AI acts sometimes. But I went with it anyway.”

Luke gave me an approving look. I flipped the holovid past the sacrifices. The possible-Snoke was ascending the steps to a platform above the crowd. Frustratingly, the camera seemed to pause just as it was zooming in, before he turned to face the crowd. The holovid stopped, flickering.

“I don’t think that’s the end. I think it’s jammed,” said Luke. He took the player in his hands gently. Both of us are good at fixing things— the Force helps us there — but he had more experience with these old objects. I could feel him using the Force on it, concentrating on some point in its tiny inner workings. I tried to follow what he was doing.

The image flashed and sizzled, and the sound came on suddenly loud. The inhumanly tall figure had reached the platform. He turned and raised his sceptre, and the crowd roared and fell to their knees, arms raised up in adoration.

The camera zoomed in. It was very possibly Snoke. Younger, with a face unmarked by scars.

“The eyes are the same,” said Luke. He sounded sure, and he knew Snoke’s face better than I did.

We watched him drink in the worship of the multitude.

“What if they’re shouting a name?” I asked. It was impossible to make out what they were shouting, but we could tell it wasn’t “Snoke”.

Luke kept scanning the inscriptions scrolling across the tower behind him.

“That symbol there looks like it could be a name. It’d be something like ‘Barzak’, if it was. That sounds more like what they’re shouting.”

“Barzak. Judging by the scars on his face now, Snoke had serious enemy problems at some point. He’d change his name and come back as somebody else.”

Barzak. Now we had a fresh lead. Both of us straightened up and looked at each other with the same hunter’s gleam in our eyes.

*    *    *

Snoke/Barzak had been all over the Galaxy. We had the name, and now we had the histories.

“He shows up on Tezera, and it can’t be more than five years before they’re building temples to his new religion,” I said, looking up from a history of the Disputed Zones.

“This could be him too. Bassak-Snok, on Farimar. Shortly after he appears in their histories, all the nations of the world unite under a theocracy. Very stable rule. Shame about the ritual dismemberments.”

“That’s a feature, isn’t it? He gets everyone to commit atrocities and then peace reigns, famines are lifted, diseases are averted….They said that about him on Verrotch, anyway.” I flicked at an old scroll with my finger.

“Verrotch? That’s an asteroid field,” said Luke.

“Does it happen to be in the habitable zone of some star?” I asked.

“Actually, it does.”

We talked it over later on while hoeing the garden. Boring work makes for productive thinking, and we found it better to think about Snoke while out in the fresh air. There could be no lurking danger in this keen wind, these high, open views of the ocean below.

“So, he must use the Force to sway people. That’s how he gets into power so quickly,” I said. I was hacking up the soft soil, sending sprays of dirt behind me. Luke grunted as he chopped the sods off the topsoil in front of me.

“He always has some promise of total reform. He says he’ll make the world a better place. I’m pretty sure he has some way to engineer the problems that miraculously disappear when he is handed control,” said Luke.

“Like he did with Ben, right? You say he gave him the night terrors, and then claimed he had a way to protect him if he obeyed him?

“Yes! But he doesn’t just want power. He wants a specific kind of power,” said Luke.

I’d wondered before why people wanted so much more than they had. Why did Snoke want more power, when he was already safely ensconced in the First Order? It seemed as though my question was not so stupid after all.

“He doesn’t just want power. He wants to be worshiped. Like a god,” I said.

“So why does it always go wrong for him? Who defeated him before?”

We thought about it while we hauled weeds back to the compost pile. Luke showed me how to plant the tubers we were growing, each with its blob of stinking fermented seaweed fertiliser.

“This is the glamour life I always dreamed of,” I told Luke.

“Me too,” he laughed. “I could have been a champion pod-racer but….” He opened his arms to gesture at it all, the wind-whipped sea, the rough, rocky island and us, covered in sweat and dirt and smears of rotted seaweed. “I couldn’t resist the appeal.”

“So, Snoke,” I said. “People turn against him. The world doesn’t improve that much under his rule, and eventually the blood sacrifices get to be too much.”

“He’d have to be a god, to do all the things he claims,” said Luke.

“But he hasn’t got enough power,” I said. A cold finger ran down my back as I said that. “I think I know where he wants to get that power.”

We both stopped work and looked at each other in dawning horror.

“How?” I asked.

“I don’t know. But I think Ben is the key. We have to get him away from Snoke.”

“We? What’s this ‘we’ business?” I gave Luke a long stare, but his jaw was set.

“Great. It’ll be like hauling rathtars all over again,” I muttered.

 

 

 

 


	5. Vanishing and reappearing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Old friends show up, and so do enemies
> 
> * * *

There was an extra stone pillar at the top of our island hilltop. One that hadn’t been there before. I stared at it for a moment, and then reached out with the Force. The pillar moved, dissolving into grey robes blowing in the wind. Luke turned towards me, just like the first time I’d met him. But this time he was smiling.

“Luke!” I laughed. “That was pretty good!”

“Still not as good as you. As soon as you used the Force, you saw me.”

Hiding was one of my first skills, even if I hadn’t known I was using the Force to help me. Luke needed to catch up with me. We wanted to leave Ahch-to together without attracting attention. I’d made up a song about it.

_“We’re all going on a Snoke hunt…”_

“Not until I can make myself as invisible as you,” said Luke.

“Oh! Oh! I have something for that!” I said, suddenly remembering. “I found something in the archive last night, but I was too tired to look at it properly. It’s called ‘The Garden of Mirrors’. I think it’s instructions on how to hide things.”

We went down to the archive and I showed him what looked like a beautiful colour map of Ahch-to hanging on the wall. “It’s so pretty, I wanted to get a better look at how it had been made. But as soon as I touched it….” I took it down from the wall to demonstrate. The map vanished, and its flat square was covered in symbols and diagrams. Then suddenly I was holding something I couldn’t see. A moment later the map returned. Luke shook his head and whistled, and went to get the translator.

I looked at the underside. “There should be some controls….” I felt around with the Force. Somehow I knew what this was.

We worked on it for most of the day, the translator squawking and buzzing over the symbols when they appeared. We copied the diagrams and discussed them.

“I think this is a meditation guide of some kind,” said Luke. “It relates to the techniques I used to get Ahch-to to hide us in the Force. Or from the Force. Try meditating on it.”

“My favourite thing,” I grumbled, but sat down, touching the map. Falling into it. Finding myself thinking of other places. Letting the words and symbols we’d deciphered work inside my mind. If you were trying to hide from somebody, wouldn’t it be good if the Force said you were somewhere else? Better than simply hiding, which I was already good at. Something like the mirror shield I’d already wrapped around my thoughts of Ahch-to, so that Kylo couldn’t find my location.

“Can you feel me in the Force, Luke?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Where am I?”

There was a long pause. “That’s very weird. I know you’re right here, but for a moment I felt you were on Jakku,” he said at last.

“It’s hard work,” I gasped. “Kind of like trying to run while holding my breath. I don't know how long I could keep it up, but I’m going to practice it.”

“It’s an anti-transponder,” said Luke, taking the map from me. “It tells people where you aren’t. Let me try.”

“Keep it. I don’t think I need it. It’s more of a guide to show you the way.”

* * *

One rainy morning I heard my favourite sound in the whole Galaxy, the whistling roar of the Millennium Falcon’s engines. It bellied out of the murk and dropped neatly onto the same flat piece of shoreline. Chewie’s touch on the controls, I thought. I’d been practicing Force-leaps with care, under Luke’s guidance, but now I almost flew down the rain-slick steps, light as a bird. I skidded to a stop just as the hatch came open.

It wasn’t Chewie who came first down the ramp, but Finn! I’d forgotten how big his smile was. We grabbed each other in a big hug and danced around in circles.

“Look what a bit of rain has done for our desert flower! You’ve bloomed!”

“I’ve seen all the rain I need to see in this life, and I never thought I’d say that. But you — you’ve been in the sun a lot, I can tell!” His dark, glossy skin had taken on an even richer red-gold cast.

“I’ve been training recruits. Let’s not talk about that though.”

“Well, so what’s the news?” My heart was beating fast. Chewie had come out by then. He put an arm around me and held me for a moment. I cricked my neck up to try to read his expression. He held a hand out and rocked it back and forth noncommittally. Good news, bad news, no news.

Finn answered instead, taking my hands in his and looking earnestly into my eyes. He knew how this mattered to me. “Your parents were back in Corellia for a couple of years after you were taken to Jakku, but they sold up everything and went into some kind of itinerant space-ship engineering work around the Galaxy. Leia’s got a team trawling for records. A couple of bounty-hunters too. They’ve got a some leads, but it looks like your parents have kept moving a lot.”

I nodded, swallowing. Not quite my dream come true, but at least I could hope, still.

“But look at this! Artoo, show her!”

Artoo bumped my legs and led me over to the shade under the Falcon’s ramp. He had a holopic, he said.

By this time Luke had arrived too. We all crowded around Artoo and he projected an image of a couple. My parents!

I kneeled down and cupped my hands around the holo to see it better. Just as Luke had said. My mother was round and snub-nosed, with light wispy hair going grey. My father had a fine-boned face with sad dark eyes. I could see myself in his mouth and jaw and forehead. I both could and could not recognise them. The almost-knowing felt like a terrible itch that I couldn’t scratch. As I stared into their holographic faces, something tugged deep inside my brain. A fishing line that came up empty, yet I couldn’t help casting it again and again, feeling it so close to hooking up a real memory. I turned away from the image and scrubbed at my watering eyes.

“Yeah, I know,” said Finn softly. “I really wanted to have better news.” I’d missed that about Finn: the way he said aloud what I was thinking, or finished my sentences for me.

“Hey, I’ve had good news today just seeing you on your feet, Finn. I really thought…”

“If you and Chewie hadn’t got me to a medbay so quickly….”

“You looked more than half dead!”

Artoo handed me the holodisc with my parents’ images and tweedled at me in a sly tone. There were some data networks in the neutral zone he would love to hack, given the chance, he said. He had an idea my parents were there. Maybe we could go…

I slipped the disc into a pocket, suddenly feeling a lot happier. I had been practicing my Force-hiding. Soon I could slip out into space, confident I could not be traced…

I could see Luke giving Artoo a look of grudging admiration. A droid with plans…

But now it came to it, I didn’t feel ready to leave Ahch-to. With all that I’d learned about Snoke and Kylo in the last few weeks, I couldn’t drop everything to go and search for my parents instead. Not yet. The knowledge came on me with painful certainty, the way things do when you don’t even realise you’ve made a choice. I caught Luke’s eye.

“I know I was in such a hurry to leave as soon as I could. But I’ve realised how much we need to learn. We’ve all suffered from being ignorant. I don’t want to make mistakes I could avoid.”

“You couldn’t carry on studying from Luke back on D’Qar? Leia wants to see her brother, you know!” said Finn. He looked speculatively at Luke. “Hi, by the way. I’m Finn.”

“I’ve heard about you. Good to meet you,” said Luke. “Finn, there’s ancient Jedi knowledge here. Rey has a gift for finding things in that archive. I haven’t wanted to say this to her, because I know how much Rey wanted to start looking for her family. But I believe we should stay here until we have figured out how we will defeat Snoke.”

“We’re shielded from him here, Finn. Snoke can’t find us and neither can, um, Ben,” I said. “I’d like to leave here knowing we’ve got something we can use against them.”

“Ben? You mean Kylo Ren? So he’s not dead!” Finn said. Chewie made a rumble of dislike. Finn continued, “Huh! Leia wasn’t sure. She thought she would sense his death in the Force, and she hadn’t.”

“Luke felt him through the Force, he says. And I can feel him searching for me. Hey, did you bring any kaffa? Let’s make some, and I’ll tell you what happened while I was his prisoner.”

“We have _kaffa,_ and we have _cake!_ ” said Finn. Luke’s eyes lit up and I danced a little jig. Chewie rumbled with amusement, saying they had _all_ the good junk food. So we all trooped up to the Falcon’s crew lounge and had a breakfast feast while Finn and I caught up on everything that had happened to us since Starkiller Base.

* *

We declared a holiday and went fishing with Luke. I’m glad Chewie enjoyed it. He can probably swim. I always wished the sea was quieter than it generally was, and Luke’s primitive boat wasn’t my kind of thing.

Luke and I introduced Finn and Chewie to beachcombing. Chewie got bored with my obsessive shell collecting and left us to it. Finn collected sea-worn stones while we walked and clambered right around the island together. Both of us agreed we hated being wet.

“Salt water is such a _nasty_ surprise,” said Finn. We splashed each other anyway. Finn’s reaction made my day.

“You haven’t told me what you’ve been doing,” I asked Finn later, as we sat and sorted our shell-and-stone collection. We were sitting on the bench in front of my hut. “You said you’re training recruits. But Chewie says you’ve seen some battles too?”

“You know some of the planets in the neutral zone that grow a lot of food? Breadbasket worlds? They were refusing to trade with us, saying they had no surplus. We shipped over for a look and there was nothing wrong with their harvests. It turns out the First Order has been turning the farms into gulags and diverting everything they produced to the Outer Rim planets they control. The farmers were living behind razor wire fences.”

Listening to him talk, I could see he’d grown up a lot in the short time we’d been apart. I could imagine him leading soldiers.

“Those places were more heavily defended than we expected, and we were forced into making an attack while we still had the element of surprise,” Finn said. “Very hard fight. Our frigate was boarded. We managed to drive the First Order out, but they set fire to as many of the crop and grain lands as they could. Gonna be a lot of hungry people soon,” Finn said.

“The First Order just has to leave poison behind when they go, don’t they?” I said.

“Yup. It’ll destabilise the planets we win,” said Finn. “One good thing, though: Leia got me in to help draft a code of conduct to deal with enemy prisoners. See, a lot of these places we liberate end up with a whole lot of captured stormtroopers. They don’t want them as prisoners, they’re a drain on their resources. People see stormtroopers instead of human beings, and they just want to exterminate them. We’re trying to figure out ways to get them out of their armour and out of the war.”

“Is it possible?” I asked. “You told me they’ve been raised to do nothing but fight.”

“We’re raised to be very loyal. You get a stormtrooper as an individual, away from his team, and show them what their enemy is really like, and you have a chance to change that loyalty.”

“I think loyalty is who you are, Finn. You make it sound like something that was programmed into you, but I think you would be like that anyway.”

He beamed at me and then looked down, suddenly shy. “I’m glad you think so,” he said. “But who can say, really? Anyway, I suggested some techniques for winning over the stormtroopers. Civilianising them, Leia calls it. Stormtroopers are good at teamwork and they’re willing to work hard, so they can really benefit their new communities.”

I could tell how proud and happy Finn was to be part of that. “It sounds difficult,” I said.

“Yeah, all we can do is give them a sort of guide to how the civilianising process might work. We’re not there to impose law on them. Planets who’ve got out from under the First Order are in no hurry to be bossed around by anyone else, even the New Republic. But on the other hand, some of them can see that we’re trying to offer more humane solutions, that we have ideas worth considering.”

Finn the statesman! I thought. He blushed and grinned, seeing my look.

A couple of times, Finn and I sparred with sticks. There was a lot I could learn from Finn’s stormtrooper fighting style. The rest of the time we ate and chatted and drank a lot of kaffa, and I juggled pebbles and balanced on my head and zipped little balls of light around their feet, and boosted slices of cake into everyone’s hands using the Force. That was all very new and amazing to Finn. Later I realised how lucky I was that he didn’t think I was turning into some weird witch magician. He trusted me no matter what, just as I trusted him.

Finn showed me some of the squads he’d been training. He was pretty fond of them, and he had a little holodisc of images with him. He lit them up, pointing out the little figures.

“These guys are my favourites. Mostly Mandalorians. They love to decorate everything — they all learn to paint in school.”

“They paint in school? Imagine! Is that stormtrooper armour they’re wearing? They’ve painted it up…”

“Yeah, that’s an in-joke with all my squads. Recycle, repair, repaint! D’Qar doesn’t have much in the way of battle simulators, so I created some cheap real-world training. We set up a whole lot of attack scenarios on along these rocky hills outside the base. Oh, my squads hated the way I made them run everywhere all the time, but they saw the use of it when they found how well they could move at speed over that kind of terrain.”

Chewie walked past and growled a few comments, saying that Finn’s squads had thrashed everyone.

“Hah! We did!” said Finn, laughing his big laugh. “And you know the best bit? We practiced with paint-guns! It was so much fun! But if you didn’t dodge your attackers you ended up looking very colourful by the end of the day! We’d call the losers ‘works of art’. The Mandalorians loved it though, and painted themselves on purpose.”

He pulled up another image — a squad of mixed races. “These guys, I love them too. They’ve got this thing where they all do battle droid voices. _‘Roger roger!’_ The Togruta woman who leads them is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. Their end of the mess hall is always in an uproar. Some shenanigans going on with them, every time!”

He sobered up for a minute, and said “That battle on the frigate, I thought I was going to lose them. They were trapped in a corridor. They were _still_ clowning round and doing the battle-droid voices while they were under fire! They’re crazy brave. I didn’t lose a single one of them that time, either.”

“Did you kid around much when you were a stormtrooper?” I asked.

“Uh, I was the odd one out. It wasn’t encouraged, that was for sure. Like being funny was…sinful, you know. Like some religion-things are sinful. You wouldn’t do it around anyone except your closest squadmates.” He thought a moment and said, “I found it pretty hard when I started training the recruits. I felt like they weren’t respecting me or taking their duties seriously, because they were always laughing. Poe made me see that they do, it’s just that they draw the line between their duties and their personal lives in a different place to the First Order.”

“Roger roger,” I said. Finn laughed.

“You need to practice! _Roger-roger!”_

“I have been practicing. This. Look!” I Force-lifted a stone from the ground (and the area round my door was getting short of stones) and skimmed it into Luke’s doorway.

 _“Rey!!!”_ yelled Luke from somewhere inside. A clump of mud and grass dropped on my head and dripped down the back of my neck. An attack from the sky. “You should have seen that one coming,” Luke said, sticking his head out of his door a second later.

Finn leaned back and laughed. Then he leaned over and gently scrubbed at the back of my neck clean with his hand. His hand was so warm! Suddenly I couldn’t look him in the eye, and my cheeks felt hot.

“Uh, I’ll go see if Luke needs any help with dinner,” said Finn, getting up clumsily.

* * *

A few days later a solid rain set in. My hut started leaking, and I moved into one of the Falcon’s cabins, preferring to enjoy the company there instead of messing about fixing stonework in the rain. On the third rainy morning the others went off to the archive to look at maps. They were trying to figure out where to set up hypercomm relays around Ahch-to. I was feeling off-colour, so I just sat in the hatchway of the Falcon, staring at the rain and feeling bored. Maybe feeling around in the Force a little, idly, with no real intentions. Wondering where my parents were.

I often sent myself to sleep imagining how I’d knock on a door in an ordinary street somewhere. My father would be taking something out of the oven, maybe. Spice biscuits. (I used to fall asleep thinking of food on Jakku, too.) He’d look up in surprise, about to say, “Who the hell are you?” — but then he’d look in my face and know. He’d drop the tray of biscuits. I’d be all flustered and clumsy and try to help pick them up, but we’d hug instead.

Or I’d spy on them. See my mother in her workshop, working on a big engine. I’d creep up on her and hand her the wrench she needed. She’d look around and stare at me for a long time, hardly daring to believe…

Unknowing, my mind would reach out into space, feeling for them with the Force. All too often I found instead the dark, brambly patch of Force that was Kylo Ren. Part of me wanted to poke it with a stick and see what it did. Did his wounds still hurt him? Was his face marked by the cut I’d given him? What was Snoke teaching him? Could I find Kylo without being caught?

I was doing that a little, maybe, as I sat in the hatchway of the Falcon.

Then I felt _him_ looking for me. That big wing sweeping across the island, darkening everything for a moment.

This time it felt like the sky was going to close on me like a fist. Suddenly the endless rainclouds felt heavy enough to pin me down. There was a thought behind them, a mind, and it wanted to get me. A grabbing mind, wanting to grab hold of my mind.

I wouldn’t let it.

Ben Solo. Kyo Ren. Best not to say either name. I’d only met him a short time, but it felt like there was more of him than would fit one name.

I found it hard to remember his face exactly. There was the face I imagined before he took off his mask. Old and heavy, like the warlords who traded with Unkar Plutt on Jakku sometimes. They were violent men who could order a death with the same cold look as they ordered a meal. Their faces had a greasy look. I had imagined a face like that, swollen with greed and anger and pride.

I was right about the pride. When Kylo Ren took his mask off, I saw as much pride as I’ve ever seen in a face. I could tell he wanted me to be impressed. Maybe he was reading my mind even then. He couldn’t stand me thinking he was old and ugly. So he took his mask off as though to say, “Look at me! So handsome, so powerful! You’ve never seen anyone like me!” And I hadn’t. He looked like a prince in a fairytale, with his full lips and thick lashes and long, arrogant nose. I was impressed, for a moment. Stunned, actually.

But it was so strange! That he _cared_ what I thought of him, while I was just terrified of him. As we looked at each other I realised something even stranger: under all that pride was the very opposite thing. Need. He needed me to admire him. So there was another face. One far less confident.

I saw that uncertain face again when we fought in the snow. He almost pleaded with me to take him as a teacher. Later, when Luke started training me to fight, he said there was no way I had enough lightsaber technique to beat the Ben he’d known. And it’s true. Kylo had me on the run until I used the Force. It was terrifying at the time, but I realised later that he didn’t attack me the way he did Finn. He wasn’t trying to kill me. He needed something from me.

Well I didn’t give a damn about him and what he thought he could get from me.

I had hated him even before I met him. Finn told me how Kylo had tortured his friend Poe, how he ordered the stormtroopers to massacre the Tuanul villagers, and how he’d cut an old man in half just to teach him a lesson about “the power of the Force”. Like it was the punchline to a joke, or something he could show off about. When Kylo and Finn fought, Kylo attacked him with spite and rage. Eyes slitted and teeth bared like he could have bitten Finn to death and drunk his blood. It was the ugliest face I’d ever seen at that moment. A nasty, snarling rodent.

He looked like somebody else when he killed his father, and he had a face I couldn’t read at all. Sad and vicious, all at the same time. A mean, frightened child. Is that possible? That’s what I saw. Something happened there that I didn’t understand.

He reminded me of the twisters I used to see in the desert, when the sand swirled up in tall columns. They would shift and change shape as you looked at them. Unstable. The wind pulled them apart.

There were people on Jakku like that. Usually they were addicted to glitterstim or alcohol. With them, you never knew who you were talking to. Sometimes they were reasonable. Generous, or funny. Or they could tell you interesting things. The next day they’d be a gibbering moron or a furious drunken idiot or a pathetic snivelling lump that would cry all over you and then try to stab you for your portions. Maybe Ren had some kind of problem like that, and it was nothing to do with Snoke at all.

I didn’t know and I didn’t care.

But this time….my vision seemed to double. I could see the rain outside the hatchway, and I could also see it falling somewhere else. A garden, a courtyard. Plants in ornamental tubs, big leaves trembling in the rain. Then a sudden jolt of somebody else’s feelings: Kylo could see what I was seeing. He recognised where I was sitting in the doorway of the Falcon, and it set off a rush of bittersweet memories. He loved that ship, he missed it, he hated everything it stood for and he was outraged that I was the one sitting in it now.

 _You!_ The thought jolted out of me. How had he found me first? Wasn’t I hidden here?

 _So you were looking for me too._ So strange, hearing his voice in my head.

 _Yes,_ I answered, before I could stop myself. Maybe I’d called him to me, thinking about him.

 _Why?_ he asked. I didn’t want to reply. I thought of the way desert lizards tossed up fountains of sand when they wanted to avoid predators. Making a screen they could hide under. I did the same with my thoughts, and I could feel Kylo draw back in confusion. He tried to find a way through, but he couldn’t unless I let him. I couldn’t see into his mind too well either. We were blundering around in a fog trying to catch hold of each other, but neither of us could. Finally we both stopped whatever it was we were doing and tried to just see each other.

 _So, enjoying your training with Luke?_ asked Kylo.

 _He knows a lot,_ I said. Not enough, I knew. Better intentions than Snoke, though. _What is Snoke teaching you?_

 _I’m going to find you,_ he said, changing the subject. So he didn’t know where I was, for all that he was speaking in my head.

 _Or I’ll find you. And I know a lot more than I did. Now I’ve got a teacher_. I hadn’t survived on Jakku by backing down to threats, and I wasn’t going to start backing down now.

 _A teacher of the weak_ , he said. _I won’t hold back next time._

 _Monster!_ The pride in him galled me and I lashed out.

 _I know, you still want to kill me. We’ll see…_.I could sense him gloating. The spiteful, arrogant devil.

 _Creep!_ That hurt his feelings. He wanted to be feared, not loathed. Bad luck for him, then.

All at once it felt like we’d both had enough of each other’s taunts, and we both broke the connection. I was breathing heavily, but I wasn’t as afraid as I’d thought. I could tell he didn’t know where I was, and I had more control over what he could and couldn’t read in my mind. It didn’t feel like he could control his emotions at all, and that made his thoughts leak out everywhere. He’d make a lousy gambler, I thought.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of the earlier stories I wrote, like Rey on the Island, turn out to be way-points or markers guiding me along the path to this story. So they appear in some form here.
> 
> This conversation crosslinks to this chapter here:
> 
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/6261889/chapters/14818516


	6. A growing connection

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once the link is made, it's hard to keep Kylo out
> 
>  
> 
> * * *

The next day I climbed by myself to the very top of the island. I hadn’t told Luke yet about my conversation with Kylo the previous day. The thought of him being in my head that way left me feeling tainted. I feared Luke’s disappointment. I’d let the enemy come so close.

The rain had cleared and the sea was a glorious blue, so I’d decided to hunt some eggs. I could use the Force to reach the topmost nests of the seabirds. Luke said he’d make something special with the eggs.

It was time for Finn and the others to leave. They’d given Luke and I a comms unit, and now they were off to drop the relays around the planet before heading back to the base. Soon we’d be able to talk to people in D’Qar. That deserved a little celebration. Though I wasn’t sure how pleased Luke was about the comms unit. I planned to stay well clear the first time he and Leia talked to each other.

When I had enough eggs, or enough guilt over robbing nests, I sat down to admire the view. The sea, blue and flat as a plate. The grassy cliffs returning the sunlight with an almost painfully bright green. The Millennium Falcon looking at home on the rocks far below.

Suddenly that jolt in my thoughts that I recognised. Kylo again, and evidently still upset by the sight of the Millennium Falcon. He’d given himself away.

_You again!_ I thought. 

_Yes, me. Nice day._

What was this? Was he trying to have a pleasant conversation now? _Get out of my head!_ I thought angrily. But my attention was too distracted to throw him out. I was wondering how long he’d been lurking there.

 _You’re in my head too, so don’t blame me for this,_ he thought. Then, hurriedly, as though trying to keep the conversation going at all costs: _You don’t like it when it rains, do you? Or the sea, when it’s rough. It looks like a very nice island today though. Where are you, Rey?_

He was trying to spring the information out of me. _Get lost! I’m not telling you anything._

Luckily Luke and I had been preparing for this long before Kylo appeared in my mind. We’d found some useful exercises in the archive, and I could keep thoughts of my location safely locked away.

 _Why are we linked like this?_ I asked.

_You have a teacher, why don’t you ask him? How is Luke, by the way?_

_He’s fine, and why would you care? He told me how your Knights tried to kill him!_

_I wouldn’t try to kill you though. I have other orders for you._

That made my skin crawl. _Orders from Snoke,_ I said. _Luke’s told me about Snoke. You are despicable, all of you._

_I doubt Luke knows all that much about Snoke. You’d be surprised what he could offer you. He knows a lot._

_A lot about what? How to kill the people who love you?_

That got him. He wasn’t as cool about his father’s death as he’d like to believe. Just mentioning the relationship made Kylo’s temper flare up.

 _And yet you still seem to know so little. Luke hasn’t even told you about the Force link_ , he thought mockingly.

I admit that got my goat. He’d spent years studying the Force, and he wanted to rub it in that I was ignorant compared to him. Still, he wasn’t the one sitting all day in an ancient Jedi archive.

 _YOU’RE not the teacher I want,_ I thought. _Your offer was … disgusting._

_But you want to know…and I will tell you. Twice we’ve been through pain together. We’ve fought. We used the Force on each other and we’ve been in each other’s minds. Sometimes such experiences forge a link. Especially if you haven’t got the detachment of a Jedi to hold yourself back._

_I will BE a Jedi!_ I answered, with more heat that any Jedi would allow.

_Too late. The link was made, in our conflict with each other._

Well, Luke and I had suspected as much. But thinking of the fight in the snow reminded me of something: the strange vision I’d had before I met Kylo. He’d been in it. I remembered a fight. I couldn’t tell when it had happened. Before I had memories? Was it at the Jedi school? I wasn’t sure.

_Three times. We have been together three times. There was fighting the other time too. You were there! And so was I!_

_I know the answers to your questions. We will meet again, Rey. You know it and I know it,_ he thought. Holding it out like a promise. Something desirable.

 _I look forward to the day_ , I thought furiously, imagining the lightsaber in my hand.

 _Strange that you are angry, and I am calm,_ he finished smugly. And with that he was gone. I didn’t feel I’d won that round.

* * *

It still wasn’t the right time to mention my connection with Kylo Ren, and I kept silent over lunch. It’d only worry Finn, and Kylo was a threat he couldn’t help us with. The others probably thought I was sad they were leaving. They were right too. Finn kept looking at me as though there was something he wanted to say. For once I couldn’t guess his thoughts. I didn’t want to pry, either.

We walked shoulder to shoulder down to the Falcon, comfortably in step.

“You happy to be fighting for the Resistance?” I asked Finn.

“It’s something I’m good at. Fighting.”

“I thought you’d had enough when you left the Finalizer.”

“I realised I didn’t have the right people to fight for. When I was in the medbay on D’Qar, I woke up one morning and General Organa was in the room. I was having a nightmare, and she just…she looked at me like she understood. She said she often did the rounds of the wards if she couldn’t sleep. Something made me ask if she had nightmares. I’ll never forget what she said. ‘All good generals should,’ she said. She knows what she’s asking when she sends people out to fight. You’d never have seen my captain in the First Order visiting the wounded.”  
 “Chewie says you’re doing a fantastic job with the recruits.”

“They probably wouldn’t agree. I train them pretty hard, running and stuff. And I make them look out for each other. If I hear anyone’s hazing anyone else, they have to make it up to them. They think I give them a lot of stupid orders.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Cleaning each other’s armour, wiping down the water bottles every day, sweeping out the compound, lots of things that make them depend on each other. Serve each other, in little ways. They question it, and I say they need to know what service is. Because in a firefight, when everything goes wrong, service and courage are the same thing.”

I thought about it. It made sense, like so many things about Finn made sense.

We sat down on the ramp of the Millennium Falcon together, waiting for the others to catch up.

“Take care, Finn. It was so good to see you.” I couldn’t say what I thought. That I was so sick of my friends disappearing and going into danger. I would always feel that way. Finn looked at me like he knew anyway.

“You’ve got your part in this war and I’ve got mine. It’s a fight worth fighting,” he said. I envied Finn. He’d lost his fear of committing to something.

Luke and Chewie arrived down the steps behind us and Artoo came out of the Falcon to meet them, tweeting that it was time to go. More hugs all round, and then they were off, swallowed up into the gathering clouds while Luke and I were still waving goodbye.

I told Luke then about my strange thought-conversations with Kylo. He frowned and led the way up to the archive. As we walked, he told me what he thought.

“I think the Force has made some link between you. The Force awakened in you only when he used it on you. His mind in yours, and yours in his. There’s plenty of evidence that something like that would form some sort of bond between your minds.”

“Erk. Even though we hate each other.”

“Makes no difference.”

I smacked the handprint in the rock door with unnecessary force. It opened and we entered the library. Luke moved a stack of books and holos from his desk to mine. “Take a look at those.”

When I’d finished looking I felt a headache coming on. Apparently there was such a thing as a Force bond, and many instances of it being formed by exactly the kind of thing that had happened when Kylo tried to interrogate me. I pushed my chair back angrily and stretched my arms above my head, feeling my spine pop and crackle. Tension.

“So I could spend the rest of my life with him popping up in my head and _saying_ things whenever he wants! And he’s so smug! Like he’s a prince or something, and I should think myself lucky he’s interested in me!”

Luke gave me a long, unreadable look. I decided it was probably better I didn’t know what he was thinking.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We get to see the conversations between Kylo and Rey from her point of view instead of his, as they were in When I am Fit to Speak. I'll try and keep repetition to a minimum.
> 
> This chapter cross-links to this one:
> 
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/6261889/chapters/14876437


	7. Kindness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When the enemy is not all bad...
> 
> * * *

And so my life on Ahch-to continued. Maybe to other people it would have seemed boring, but to me it was incredibly fulfilling. The days spent chasing knowledge in the archive and practicing what I learned were balanced by hard, simple work in Luke’s vegetable garden, or fishing, or repairing things. I spent peaceful hours collecting whatever the sea washed up. Shells, driftwood, the delicate bones of mysterious sea-creatures, and flotsam hinting at life elsewhere. I decorated my hut with the things I found.

Luke’s reserve concealed great kindness, and I learned to be alert for what he might teach in less obvious ways. To me, his Jedi knowledge was no more than I expected. To see him read the weather in the clouds, or observe the secrets of birds and fish, or judge the exact moment to flip a hotcake in one economical movement — these were also an education.

Both of us were used to spending time alone, and we gave each other space. For me, our solitude was enriched by the new hope I had, that somewhere my parents still lived and could be found.

Ahch-to wasn’t completely deserted, and Luke’s island was visited every few months by a supply boat that plied a route between distant, larger islands. I stayed out of sight when it landed. No need to arouse anyone’s curiosity.

We were not really isolated now, though. Every now and then the comm unit in Luke’s hut crackled to life. Whatever Luke and Leia said the first time they spoke together, it must have gone well. Luke looked fairly content afterwards. “Leia agrees we should take our time preparing before we come out of hiding,” was all he said to me afterwards.

 _“Roger roger,”_ I said.

Something bothered me about the Force, but I couldn’t find the answer in the library. How did the Force fluctuate in the Galaxy, and was it linked to Snoke’s activities? I had a pile of notes on my desk, trying to find connections. In some times and places, people did not recognise the Force, but surely the Flying Monks of Sharan-dur had been Force users? Snoke had massacred them.

Not always Light side users, either. I’d found a Ballad of Barazak-Sun, that told of a long war between a tall blue magician and the Nightsisters. It ended in a lightsaber battle that described Barazak-Sun’s wounds in meticulous and rather satisfied detail. The exact same wounds as the Snoke we all knew.

Sometimes he slaughtered Force users, and sometimes he promoted and protected them. It made no sense, until the day I helped Luke with his fruit trees.

I loved trees, and the fact that these trees would repay our care with food made them extra special to me. I watched Luke nervously as he trimmed them with meditative strokes of his lightsaber, pausing to analyse the result with each one.

“This is a strong shoot. It’ll only make leaves this year, but we’ll leave it. This one’s too weak for fruit, so we’ll lop it off. This one’s ready to bear. I’ll tie it so it’s bent downwards. Makes it easier to reach the fruit, plus the stress makes it more productive.”

I had a sudden vision of Snoke. Didn’t he prune Force users the same way? Why? Did he want to create a particular kind of Force user?

My fight training stepped up. It was impossible not to. Kylo’s unwelcome visits to my mind made me determined to defeat him if we met again.

Defeat him, then what, though? The question weighed on me. I could have killed him already.

“How do you kill someone, Luke?”

“You know about fifty ways already Rey. What are you asking?”

“Afterwards. Like, you must have killed thousands when you blew up the Death Star. Did you think about it afterwards? I couldn’t put a lightsaber through one lousy murderer that was just lying there _asking_ for it…”

Luke thought for a while before answering. We were in his hut — we usually ate together in the evenings — and he was stirring his eternal pot of seafood chowder.

“Well, at the time people were shooting at me to try and kill me. So that was survival, fighting back. Afterwards…I think part of my Jedi training helped me. At least Yoda taught me that. I felt like I’d moved through the Force to do its will.”

I thought about that for a while. I didn’t like it. “So, it felt like you didn’t have to make a choice to kill or not?”

“Kind of,” he said. “It does haunt me. Those people might have been like Finn. I do know that. But I don’t feel guilty. I know that sounds terrible, but at the very least I felt some balance was kept, through my actions. Many more would have died if I hadn’t acted.

“You know who will struggle with it more, is Finn,” Luke continued. “He’s a warrior, I can tell. But even so it’s not going to be easy going up against his own people. I think you two might be able to help each other.”

“I think the thing he finds hardest is the way civilians get caught up in it,” I said. We’d talked on the hyperlink a few times. Finn avoided much detail about the fighting, but I could see how it shadowed him. “He talks about service. He gives his troops a lot of chores that seem dumb, but as he says to them, how will they follow the hard orders if they can’t follow the simple ones?”

Luke nodded. “I’m very impressed with that young man.”

“He says one day they’ll know they’ve killed the wrong people. Kids. People who have no part in the war. He calls it blood guilt. They all share in that. I think he meant that they need to know that when they follow orders, they’re not alone. The guilt is shared with the ones that give the orders. To him, and through him to the people who plan the war.”

“He has broad shoulders, to carry that on himself.”

I smiled, thinking of him.

* * *  
More rain, and I was in my hut making a half-hearted effort to meditate in the prescribed Jedi fashion, instead of making a wild grab at the Force with some half-cocked scheme, or listening to the planet, or trying to read a bird’s mind while it flew.

Instead, there was Kylo, suddenly in my head. Less of his quivering intensity this time. I had the vague impression he was at a workbench, using some tools on a lightsaber. This was a side of him I hadn’t seen: much calmer, as he concentrated on his work. He’d been thinking of me and…whoops. Here we were again.

 _I saw your landspeeder. Did you make it yourself?_ he asked. _It looked fast._

Oh. More chit-chat. Trying to be friends, was he?

He said he loved flying too.

Yeah, probably while chasing down someone he intended to destroy, I thought.

He said he admired my flying. He’d seen recordings from the TIE-fighters that chased me on Jakku, he said. It was creepy to think of him watching me.

I could see into his mind, how he ranked people according to their usefulness. Not surprisingly, he didn’t appear to have any friends in the First Order. The Resistance believed Kylo worked closely with General Hux, but I could read nothing but loathing and rivalry with his supposed ally.

 _Rey, we are the only two people in the Galaxy that have the Force in the way that we do. We are going to meet sooner or later. It is our destiny. So we may as well talk,_ he said.

Gungan gods though, how many people got sucked into this talk of destiny, I wondered. Was it just the Force making people do what it wanted? I didn’t think I owed Kylo a visit, that’s for sure.

 _I don’t believe in destiny,_ I said. _Darth Vader thought it was Luke’s destiny to rule the Galaxy beside him. He was wrong. Why are you repeating the same sort of talk thirty years later? I’ll make my own destiny, just as Luke did._

Our contact wavered and broke off, with a backwash of frustration from Kylo. I hugged myself for comfort. The intensity of his interest was hard to bear.

* * *

This was the pits. The Force-bond was getting worse. I could hardly drift off to sleep without catching fragments of whatever Kylo was up to. He couldn’t always tell I was there, which was a win for me.

How confusing, to be lying half-asleep on my little pallet and then feel as though I was lying in a comfortable bed somewhere else. In some familiar pain: evidently Kylo had overdone his fight training. I knew those aching muscles, I had them myself. But these were not _mine,_ and this was not my body. I was not lying in the subdued luxury of wherever this was, some large comfortable room with old-fashioned wall-hangings and curtains. There was a gruesome-looking half-melted helmet on a shelf above _this_ bed.

Somebody was talking to him. A woman. He wasn’t looking at her, so I couldn’t see her. All I could tell about her was that she had a beautiful voice and she was talking about something important to her. This was one of the people Kylo ranked as “useful,” but to my amazement, he was listening to her with sympathy. He thought she had a terrible life, and it bothered him.

 _“If you don’t need me for anything, I’ll go,”_   she said. She was finished doing whatever she was doing in his room. What the kriffing heck was she doing in his room?

 _“Good night,”_ he said to her.

 _Who's the girl?_ I asked.

 _My servant,_ he thought.

Well, that would figure. Of course, he had servants. No doubt they reinforced his sense of superiority. He could afford to be kind to servants. They posed no threat to him at all.

Kylo seemed to pick up that thought, and this time it was him throwing me out of his head.

_Bye, Rey._

* * *

It started driving me crazy, knowing Kylo was out somewhere living a dark mirror of my life — fight training like I was, looking for me as I was looking for him, studying the ways of the Dark Side as I was studying the ways of the Jedi. And he was fixing his lightsaber!

I tried to spy on him. It was confusing. It felt like there were two Kylos. One of them was jittery and aggressive and miserable, as though forcing himself into a mould that didn’t fit. Yet he wouldn’t stop trying, no matter how much it hurt. He was driven by some ambition to be Snoke’s perfect student.

The other Kylo was merely intense. Intelligent and curious. I began to see why Luke and Leia were so sad about losing the Ben they’d known. He hadn’t always been a vicious jerk, the sort of boy that, as they say, only a mother could love. I remembered how, in the interrogation room, he’d seen my loneliness before anything else. If I put aside the horror of discovering that somebody else could reach into my thoughts, I could see that his first reaction had been sympathy. He was so unbearably lonely himself.

There was a story in one of the Jedi histories about a young Twilek padawan who was captured by a warlord who planned to kill her as a lesson to his enemies. But first he intended to spend a night with her. Alone with him in his bedroom, that cunning little girl started to tell him a story so long and so interesting that he had to put off her murder until the following night. The next night, the story continued and once again he couldn’t bear to kill her before hearing how it ended. And so on…

That was Kylo’s mysterious servant girl in a nutshell. Kriffing heck, she could talk! But it calmed Kylo down, having her around. I caught him listening to her read to him in her musical voice, acting out all the parts of some drama. She threw herself into the roles with such relish that I could feel Kylo following her into those old tales, drawn in by words that would lift the hair off your scalp. When she was reading, the First Order and all its works could burn to slag for all she cared. And Kylo too was poised in suspense, waiting to see how the story would unfold.

Maybe it was the latest thing among rich people, to have a live person tell them a story instead of watching it on a holovid. Lurking in Kylo’s head, I actually fell asleep listening to her read to him. Well, that was why he liked it, I guess. He had trouble falling asleep. Bad dreams, the reward of evildoing, I thought.

I told Luke what I was picking up on what we jokingly called ForceComms. “He seems to be living in some sort of First Order palace. He has servants. I think he sees Snoke sometimes, and when he does he gets all angry and, I don’t know, anxious. Like Snoke’s laying down his path and he’s determined to do it, to claim his power, and desperate to believe it’s the right thing to do.”

“To do what?” asked Luke, though we both knew the answer.

“To find me, defeat me, bring me over to the Dark side. That kind of thing.”

“I’ll ask Leia if she has any idea about where that palace might be. You keep trying to find him in the Force.”

We’d been trying to understand old Jedi maps that showed how the Force fit over the actual Galaxy of stars and peoples. Either the maps were wrong, or things moved. The direction of Kylo or anything else in the Force was little help in finding him in spacetime.

A few days later I felt Kylo looking for me, and I tried to ease into his head without being spotted.He was sitting outside above some huge, complex garden full of statues and fountains. It was hot. Just then the servant girl arrived up some stairs, carrying a tray of cold drinks. Kylo seemed pleased to see her. Then he noticed me.

_Hi._

I didn’t say anything back, just watched. The girl poured a drink, then asked if she could have the night off. She was wanted elsewhere, to play music for some officers’ wives. I felt Kylo’s spike of annoyance, something to do with his rivals in the First Order. But she was looking at him appealingly. She looked nothing like I’d imagined, from hearing her voice. A soft, open face. She looked like she wouldn’t hurt a bug. Kylo said yes to her request, and she made an dramatic leap for the stairs, wrists cocked like a dancer’s.

“You’re the only adult person I have ever seen that actually jumps for joy,” Kylo said. She turned back. Maybe she wouldn’t squash a bug, but she had no fear of Kylo Ren, mass murderer. She was grinning.

“Oh, this is funny!” she said. “You know what Hux likes? Guavian bagpipes. A whole marching band of them, with drummers. He says they inspire the men. He played us a clip of them, and it was like the hellfire death of the universe set to music.” Kylo watched her bouncing off down the stairs, full of enthusiasm.

 _You’re nice to her,_ I thought, after a while. I was having to adjust my thoughts because I’d imagined this girl as some kind of hard-faced temptress. The sort of woman that could hold her own at Maz Kanata’s, like a bounty hunter, armed to the teeth.

 _Serving the Dark doesn’t mean I have to terrorise everyone all the time_ , he thought.

I had trouble imagining Kylo liking anyone at all. _But you like terrorising people. It makes you feel powerful. In the interrogation room. I felt it. You wanted to be in control._

 _I had a job to do,_ he countered, somewhat defensive. _And Spikey is hardly a threat. She’s good at her job, and she’s funny._

Spikey. The name didn’t fit her, unless she more poisonous than she looked.

_In other words, she knows her place. You’re all charm, you. I bet she secretly hates you._

_I’d know if she did. And she doesn’t. Quite the opposite._ His thoughts revealed conversations they’d had. The kinds of conversations I had not had with any man. She was his slave, and he could take her into his bed if he wanted to. Sometimes he wanted to, and sometimes she wanted him to. But they hadn’t, and whether they would remained a blank space in their relationship that they circled around for reasons that weren’t clear to me or to him.

 _UGH! What’s wrong with her?_ Suddenly I felt such dislike for this Spikey person. She must be a fool if she couldn’t tell what Kylo was capable of. And if she knew what he’d done, and still smiled at him, then she was simply vile.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This links across to here in When I am Fit to Speak:
> 
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/6261889/chapters/14876437
> 
> and here:
> 
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/6261889/chapters/14942191


	8. A cold wind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snoke is a disturbing presence. Kylo is a confusing presence. Life is not so black and white.
> 
> * * *

A few days later, it almost found me. The cold wind, the crack in the door, the chilly mind that sucked the warmth out of the sun. Snoke.

I was paring roots for the evening stew. Fear made me drop the knife. I looked over at Luke. He had been stirring a pot but now he was frozen, concentrating. I remembered my trick of tossing up a confusing screen like a sand-lizard throwing up sand and burrowing down into the desert. Invisible. I did it again, but subtle, subtle. Snoke must not feel me use the Force or we would be revealed.

The shadow passed. I could breathe again.

“I saw what you did there, Rey. Quick thinking.”

“He was close, though.”

It was terrifying. I’d got a sense of Snoke’s mind, like a spider with its cold, endlessly patient thoughts, weaving webs of ill intent. For the next few nights my dreams were full of despair. I would be in the middle of an ordinary day, perhaps working in the garden, and realise that under every stone was a cold and utterly poisonous creature watching me. I’d pick the moss off a stone and the stone was a face, watching me.

Unable to sleep, I got up to watch the moon rise over the ocean. The endless sighing of the water on the shore did not disturb me any more. Under the freezing threat of Snoke, I found the water’s restless motion a comfort.

My vision doubled suddenly. Kylo had linked to me. He was watching the moonlight too, where he was. A pond, instead of the ocean that reflected my moon. He wondered whether I was going to stay on my island forever. I think he could read my fondness for it, for my life there. It stirred me up with guilt. I was meant to go hunting soon: to hunt Snoke, or to hunt Kylo and get him out of Snoke’s clutches. Whichever one proved to be possible.

_I will come looking for you when I’m ready,_ I thought. _Then watch out!_

He seemed too tired to argue.

_I suppose Luke and Leia want you to bring me to them. So I can be judged and punished,_ he thought.

That went both ways. I knew Snoke wanted me just as much. To win me to his side, even. What I’d just experienced of Snoke, there was no way in all the seven Corellian hells I was going that way. At least Kylo was human, with all his heat and impulsiveness.

_We are enemies,_ he thought miserably. _It may be our destiny to fight. But I would rather you joined us. Look at this place. It could be yours too. That has to be better than freezing in a stone hut._

I wouldn’t trade my stone hut for his palace brimful of rivalry and spite. I thought of Luke’s chesspieces analogy, from months ago. Me as the White Queen. Kylo dreamed of me as the Black Queen instead. Himself as the Knight.

_Has Snoke painted some picture of you and I as his right and left hands in the Force, ruling together from his secret Palace?_

_He will break you, if you defy him_ , Kylo said. Without pleasure. I wondered what was up with him.

_He’ll have to catch me first_ , I retorted, though my heart wasn’t in it either. Perhaps Kylo and I were both equally reluctant pieces in this game. Sometimes it felt like he was just mouthing Snoke’s words. He didn’t even convince himself. If I reached into him with the Force, I could feel nothing but confusion. He’d done right, he’d done wrong, he didn’t know any more.

_You hate yourself so much!_ I thought. _I would hate myself too, if I’d done what you did. But I don’t know why you think the cure is to find worse things to do._

_I have given all my loyalty to the Dark. That’s not hard to understand_ , he said. I could imagine he was looking down his long nose at me.

_Look at the moonlight on the water,_ I said after a while. _They are opposites, the black and the white. The water does not seek to swallow the moon, and the light does not consume the water. Side by side. That’s what Luke says._

_Luke can be pretty poetic when he’s quoting somebody else_ , Kylo said. _But what does that mean for us, for the way people live? Sometimes I don’t think he knows what he means._

_He tries to put things into words, but I think he’s mostly always done things by instinct,_ I said. _He didn’t get a lot of training from Yoda, in the end._

There was a long pause. Kylo seemed calmer. I think that’s the first time I looked into him, I mean really looked. Not looking for an advantage, or a weakness, or some way to block him. But just observing him, right when he wasn’t consumed by the whirling chaos of anger and anxiety and thoughts he ought to think and ones he needed to avoid thinking. He was deep, and in his quieter moments he longed for things that he couldn’t name or admit.

_Have you ever thought….that maybe nobody understands the Force any better than us?_ I thought suddenly, surprising myself as much as him. _All the talk, all the writings, they don’t describe how it feels…I mean, Yoda was meant to be the greatest teacher. He’d lived so long. But I don’t really get anything he’s supposed to have said._

I’d read a great deal more than just what Yoda said, of course. But I was beginning to suspect that the Force changed over time. Yoda might have had the best knowledge of the Force as it was _now._

_Yoda would have been a nightmare as a teacher_ , said Kylo. _But Snoke….Snoke knows. He’s studied it all his life, and he’s lived a long time. If you want real knowledge, you need Snoke._

I got the unmistakable sense that Kylo was faking it right then. Nowhere near as certain as he would like me to believe. I’m not sure he knew that about himself. He had so many walls in his mind, he had to dodge around all over the place to think about anything at all.

_No thanks. Look at you, you misery-guts,_ I thought. I might have probed further to see where Kylo stood with Snoke, only just then Spikey showed up out of the darkness. She had something slung over her shoulder. His pet poet, I thought. Instead of being annoyed by her, today I almost felt like laughing. She was the most unlikely person to have anything to do with the brooding mess that was Kylo Ren.

“Hi. What are you doing out so late? Looking for Rey?”

“Yes,” he said.

I sat back in the Force-link to watch them.

“Why can’t you just leave her be? You here in your part of the Galaxy, doing Sith-y things, and she in hers? Isn’t that enough of that Balance they talk about?”

“Snoke wants her,” said Kylo. “Like she is now, she’s a threat. Either she works with us, or he destroys her. Otherwise we’ll never bring order to the Galaxy.” _Hear that, Rey?_ he thought.

_You’re a fake, Kylo,_ I thought.

“Look around you!” said Spikey angrily.

_Oh no, here goes,_ thought Kylo. Spikey launched into a tirade against the First Order and the vile people who represented its leadership. If he saw order, she saw nothing but corruption and venality.

_Hah! Well that was a bracing insight into the First Order,_ I thought. I noticed Kylo didn’t argue with her, either. He just sat there, stirring the gravel of the pathway with the toe of his boot.

Spikey sat next to him and unhitched the thing off her back. It was a musical instrument of some kind.

"What's your answer then?" asked Kylo bitterly.  She didn't answer, but soothed him down with a quiet trickle of notes. It grew into something else, something powerful that changed and twisted out from under the ear just as you thought you understood it.

“Listen,” she said, and she drew Kylo — and me with him — into music unlike anything I’d ever heard before. Well, obviously I hadn’t heard a lot of music in my life. _This_ music asked questions and answered them. It circled around a longed-for perfection, struck it dead-centre, and then unmade it to reform it into something new.

Then Spikey said, “I don’t know how to say it in words, better than that. That there is no one answer, no perfect way that trumps all other ways…That we create every moment ourselves, and it changes. I don’t know. Things move. Snoke might like to bind things to an unchanging rule of law, freezing everything in one place, but even ice moves. Glaciers move, the water moves secretly below the ice. And people are like that too, only more so.”

Kylo had almost forgotten about me and the Force-link. Spikey complained of the cold, and he took her hand and helped her up. They walked hand in hand through the moonlit garden to a gate and parted ways through some unspoken consent.

I couldn’t name what I felt right then. I wished we could have Spikey as a spy for us. In her quiet way she was as subversive as water. She didn’t care a damn for the First Order, or the Force, or the Dark Side.

Her hand in his. It upset me so! And yet when he turned all his attention on me I drew back with the impact of it. I could almost feel it on my skin, like hand laid on my cheek. The longing in him! Nobody ever touched me like that!

_What are you?_ I asked. _What is she?_ She was a nobody, just as I was.

_I don’t know what any of us is,_ he thought. _Friend, enemy, Knight of Ren, servant, scavenger, lover..._

_No not that!_ we both thought at the same time.

_Murderer!_ I said, and broke the link. I stood on the moonlit hilltop a long time, looking at the silver lines of surf far below and hugging myself for warmth. Kylo kept surprising me, and I didn’t know what to do.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This refers to this chapter in When I am Fit to Speak
> 
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/6261889/chapters/15003796


	9. Things you wish you didn't know

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey wishes she couldn't see so much of Kylo's life. But finds it hard to look away
> 
> * * *

“I am not going tell General Organa about, ah, _Ben’_ s personal life,” I told Luke. “I’m sure she didn’t set up the hyperlink relays to hear that.”

“Everyone’s got a weakness, Rey. This might be his.”

“Luke, I’m not talking to Leia about her son’s sex life!”

Too late. Luke was already moving over to where he’d crammed the hypercomm console into a corner of his hut. My hopes that something would interfere with the dodgy hyperlinks were disappointed, for Leia’s face appeared in the screen almost right away. Her large, spartan quarters were visible behind her, barred with late sunlight and strewn with datapads.

“Luke!” She gave him a worried smile “Everything okay with you?”

“Yes, we’re fine. Any leads finding this First Order palace Ben’s staying in?”

“No, not yet. Our intelligence has confirmed it exists though. How’s the Force-link between Ben and Rey? Is that still happening?”

“Yes, that’s definitely a thing. They’re both figuring out how to talk to each other _and_ block each other.” Luke looked over his shoulder at me. “Would that be right, Rey?” I nodded, and he went on. “Anyway, there’s been some interesting news there. Rey, tell Leia what you told me.” He motioned me to take his place in front of the screen.

Leia smiled warmly at me, but there was no disguising the sharp interest in her eyes.

“Hi Rey. You’re looking well. Tell me, what’s been happening?”

I swallowed. “Well, ah, Ben and I talk now and then. It’s like he can come into my mind and I can go into his. I can spy on him sometimes but usually he notices when I’m in his head.”

“Is he spying on you?”

“Yes, but I catch him doing it. He doesn’t know where I am, I can tell.”

Leia’s gaze sharpened. “What do you talk about?”

“Mostly he threatens to come and find me. Or tells me I’d do better to learn from Snoke.”

“How does he seem?”

“Uh…miserable. Confused. I don’t think he’s totally convinced by what Snoke tells him any more, but he’s trying to not think about it.”

“Well, that’s something,” Leia said. “Thanks for telling me that.” I could tell she was trying to look calmer than she felt. “I know it must be very distressing to be in Ben’s head, or have him talk to you through this Force-link. You’re very good, to handle it so well.”

I could hear her unspoken thought, _bring him back!_

“It’s better than Snoke. I can feel him searching for me too.” I shuddered and Leia’s brows wrinkled with concern.

“I’m the last person to tell you not to worry,” she said. “And I wish I had news about your parents to cheer you up, but we’re still following up on some leads. Would you like to talk to Finn?”

I nodded gratefully, and she spoke into another comms unit to call Finn over.

“Rey…” said Luke, chidingly. ‘Tell her the other thing.”

I swallowed again. “Uh, there’s this girl that he likes.”

“What _kind_ of a girl?” said Leia, in exactly the same disbelieving tone as Luke had when I told him.

“She’s a servant. Slave, really. But he’s nice to her. She calms him down.” I thought about it. That wasn’t quite accurate. “Or, I mean, they argue too. It’s weird. She doesn’t have any special powers, and he could _crush_ her, but she’s not afraid to argue with him. He argues with everyone, actually, but with her it’s like a game. He seems to hate everyone else in the Palace, by the way. General Hux included.”

“So…she’s some sort of a concubine?” asked Leia, looking like she would rather not know.

“No. He thinks of her more like sort of pet. It’s not like she’s super-pretty or anything.” Leia stared at me. “Though she’s not ugly either,” I added. “There are other women in the palace, um, provided for…um.”

“Can you get inside her head?” she asked.

“Ugh. I’d rather not,” I blurted out.

Leia looked at me beadily. “Anything Ben does that goes against Snoke’s teaching is worth finding out about. I can’t imagine Snoke would approve of Ben liking girls or being kind to servants.”

“She’s too unimportant, Snoke wouldn’t even care. Though he should. She’s so cynical about everything the First Order stands for.”

“So. I want to know what she does that calms Ben down,” said Leia sternly. No disguising that it was an order.

“She scrubs his back and cooks for him! She reads to him to help him sleep,” I muttered. “I’m never going to….”

“Just find out if she has some sort of hold on him,” Leia said sharply.

Just then Finn arrived in Leia’s quarters, and she moved out of the way so he could sit in front of the screen.

“Hey girl! Looking good. Staying dry?”

“Yeah, we’re all good. Luke traded for some Endorian chickens, and we’re eating like kings at the moment. How about you?”

Finn grimaced. He looked tired. “Oh, I’m okay. We had to bury some of our own though. I just didn’t get there in time…”

I could see Leia, who was poking at a datapad in the background, give him a sympathetic look. Finn changed the subject.

“I hear you and Kylo Ren are talking to each other through the Force or something? What’s that like?”

“It’s _Ben,_ not Kylo!” muttered Leia in the background. Finn rolled his eyes, out of her sight.

“It feels like I haven’t got much privacy,” I said. “Though I can get him back by getting into _his_ head too.” Finn pulled a digusted face “Not that I want to!,” I said hurriedly. “But Leia wants to know what’s going on with him. And _he_ wants me to know that he’s having a wonderful life in a palace with servants and lovers and important meetings with General Hux and lessons with Snoke…” Of course he hadn’t told me all that, I’d snooped.

“He’s quite the catch, then,” said Finn. I pulled a face and he laughed.

“I’ll tell him you send your regards, shall I?”

“Tell him I think he’s stupid,” said Finn.

“‘Finn reckons you’re stupid.’ I got that. I’ll tell him,” I said, laughing, until an unwelcome thought struck me. “Hey Finn, if you’re ever in a situation, you know, where you could fight him like you did on Starkiller Base…Please don’t. Tell me you won’t. Next time he’ll kill you, and I couldn’t stand that.”

Finn quietened down and looked at me seriously.

“Don’t… _die_ for me, Finn. I couldn’t live with that. I wouldn’t want to.”

“No promises, babe,” he said, and went on to talk of other things. His C-squad had helped capture a First Order grain freighter convoy and divert it to New Republic areas that were facing a famine. Poe and his X-Wings had been spectacular in that action, he said.

I drank in his stories of life on D’Qar, and my mood lightened. He could laugh at himself and laugh at others without mocking them. Life was an adventure, and he threw himself into it with such a whole heart.

“I got a second chance at life, Rey. Not many people get that. I’m going to enjoy every second.”

* * *

“Before, you said ‘Ben’s sex life’” said Luke, after Leia and Finn had signed off. “Is there something you’re not telling us?”

“No! It doesn’t matter. There are comfort women in the Palace, that’s all. He’s always trying to make me feel that I’m just a child compared to him.” He was an adult man, with lovers, servants, a palace, an army, a place in the First Order’s leadership, and years of education. It made me miserable, but I didn’t want Luke to know that.

“Oh, it’s just another one of his power games. Trying to knock your confidence. Don’t let it worry you, Rey. All those things have only messed him up. You’ve got the Force and you’ve got good judgement, and look how far it’s taken you already!”

“Luke, did you ever…you know, have a relationship? Before you were a Jedi, or something?”

“There isn’t enough alcohol on Ahch-to to get me talking about that,” said Luke, laughing.

There wasn’t _any_ alcohol, as far as I could tell. But whatever was in his dark past, he didn’t seem worried about it now. The famous Jedi detachment, I supposed.

I went off to bed after that, feeling unsettled. Just as I dropped off to sleep, I felt something like a hand caressing slowly from the hollow of my throat, across my breasts and down to my thighs, setting my skin alight all the way down. Furiously I cast my thoughts through the Force-bond towards Kylo. But he was fast asleep. So it was my own desires to blame for that, melting my flesh from my bones.

I hadn’t had too many of those feelings before. By the time I was a teenager, most of the boys my age had left Jakku as their families left to find better pickings elsewhere. There weren’t many human beings of any kind there, let alone young men a girl could dream about. Occasionally a ship would touch down piloted by some man that seemed young and handsome enough for me build some fantasies around. But what was I going to do, anyway? They would go, and I would stay.

I’d been eating better in the last few months than I ever had on Jakku, and all that extra energy had to go somewhere. I was having more of the kind of feelings that are useless if you’re sleeping in a hut by yourself.

I curled up in a defensive ball and eventually fell asleep. My dreams were full of cracked walls. There was a spider in every crack. I could see the tips of their legs poking out. They were watching me, every one of them.

* * *

  
_People are nothing if they have no loyalty._ Kylo, boasting at me the next day. I was out in the boat with Luke, fishing. Reluctantly, I might add.

Well, so of course we would argue about Finn.

 _He was a traitor_ , thought Kylo.

 _To you. Not to me. When he could choose his own destiny, he risked his life to come back for me. That’s loyalty,_ I told him. I still felt giddy when I remembered meeting him again on Starkiller Base. We’d hugged and just about danced around, we were so happy to see each other. Kylo picked up that image and his mood turned really vicious.

_Not your family though. They never came back. Where’s the loyalty in that?_

_I’m sure they would have if they could! Maz thought so,_ I lashed back at him. Gungan gods, he was determined to make me feel miserable. I wouldn’t let him have that.

 _Okay, so they would have come back. They seemed nice enough_ , Kylo thought.

I almost couldn’t breathe. Had he just said…?

 _What, you’ve met them?_ I said, the question exploding out of me.

_I think I met them. I think we’ve met four times, not three. You were a very small child. You and your family were visiting some country estate, and I was there with Luke and … you had a brother that was a candidate for Luke’s Academy…You climbed a wall. I offered to help you down but you jumped into Luke’s arms instead._

He was going to carve my heart right out of me and splatter it to smithereens, at this rate. How could he remember me as a child? Remember my family? The injustice of it made me want to scream.

Luke looked over at me.

“You all right?”

“Fine,” I muttered, busy trying not to show Kylo how upset I was. Kriff it, he knew. I threw him out of my head.

* * *

Luke kept nagging though. What was Ben up to?

I’d better go look.

I couldn’t stay away, anyhow. What else might he tell me about my family?

The next time I made the link, he was meditating with somebody else. A chilly, fierce woman who was guiding him through some exercises intended to help him find me. That was unexpectedly funny, with me right there.

 _Your teacher?_ I asked cattily.

 _For some things,_ he thought. He was thinking of telling her I was in his head at that moment. He decided against it.

She seemed like an unmitigated bitch. I really can’t think of another way to put it.

 _I don’t think I’d tell her anything either,_ I said. Then I picked up something from his mood. He was not his usual self. Crackling with energy and well-being, yet unusually relaxed. _You seem happy all of a sudden,_ I thought. Something to do with Spikey.

_I’m finally getting out of here. Snoke’s sending me on a mission._

Yeah, right, I thought cynically. Such a poor liar. Still, the news about the mission was important too, and I asked about it. He got snarky. Was I planning to stop him? he asked.

_Stop yourself. And tell Snoke to stop sniffing around after me all the time. He’ll wear himself out._

That made him instantly furious. It was supposed to be his search, not Snoke’s!

 _Seems like he’s not trusting you to succeed,_ I said, igniting a burst of outrage from him. I broke the link. I was full of win, today!

* * *

“Any luck getting inside that girl’s head…what’s her name again?” asked Luke. We were sparring in a little flat space near the top of the island, sheltered from the wind by a couple of granite tors. I walloped my lightsaber expressively against a boulder before answering.

“Spikey,” I said shortly. Ridiculous name.

“Rey!” said Luke warningly. “You’re not thinking like a Jedi.” He danced across the stones towards me and disarmed me before I knew he was moving. Which proved his point nicely. I put my lightsaber down.

“Luke, none of this is turning out how we expected. You’re not leading the Resistance. I’m not looking for my parents, nobody’s found them or Snoke. Ben hasn’t found me, we haven’t had an epic lightsaber battle…I know Leia thinks that’ll happen and then I’ll claim him for the Light and bring him back to his family!”

“And then big hugs all round. That’d be nice,” said Luke, snorting. “People expected big things of me too, Rey. But in the meantime, what do you want to do? We can’t do much until we know where they are, or they come and find us. That’s the truth, no matter how little you like that. Right now the most Jedi thing you can do is sit and observe what our enemies are doing, Rey. Patience!”

“RRRRhh!”

“And stop getting mad at Spikey. She’s undermining Snoke with Ben, and that’s more than any of us have managed.”

“Hah, funny. That should be my job. And Ben’s angry because he thinks finding me is _his_ job, and he’s really unhappy that Snoke is going behind his back to look for me as well!”

Luke shrugged. “The Force works in mysterious ways. I do know that rushing out and trying solve everything myself didn’t always turn out very well.”

* * *

It was easier than I would have expected to get into Spikey’s mind. She had Force-users in her family. She also had a brain like a tornado in a yarn factory, and that was pretty challenging to spend time in. Still, I made the link.

She was in Kylo’s room and they were having a swearing competition. Or something. It was insane. Exactly the kind of insanely stupid thing Finn and I would do. I just couldn’t square the snarling madman I’d seen on Starkiller base with the happy dope she was looking at, sprawled on his bed laughing his head off. I started to laugh too. Spikey was no fool around the Force, though, and she seemed to realise I was there. I got out in a hurry.

She certainly knew a Kylo I'd never met.

* * *

_Ben!_

_The name’s Kylo —_

_Yeah, really? Where did you even get that name?_

_Oh, you wouldn’t understand. Go back to your shell collecting._

_Was he a famous Sith or something?_ I’d found half a dozen Kylos in the archives. None of them led exemplary lives, but Kylo’s opinion might be different. I just wanted to know which one he’d chosen.

 _Or did Snoke choose it?_ I asked.

 _Rey, leave it!_ he said, exasperated. _Why can’t we just have a conversation?_

_Because we’re enemies!_

_Yeah, and we can still talk. I mean, you really mean to use the Force-link just to annoy me?_

It did seem pretty childish, when he put it that way.

_Yes, in the great war between the Dark and the Light, I will be remembered as Rey the Sith-Annoyer. So I can have my own stupid made-up name._

Kylo laughed aloud. _It suits you. But I’m not a Sith, you know._

 _You’re working on it though. Hey, so what’s your mission?_ I tried a kind of mental pounce to wrestle the information out of him. Something to do with intelligence. Not to do with me. He’d be flying. Endor? I’d have to pass that on to Leia.

Fighting to get information out of Kylo like that was something new. I felt like I’d been dunked underwater, and I was short of breath. Then he managed to put up some sort of screen so I couldn’t see more. He’d got something out of me too.

_You’re in a library?_

_I like books,_ I thought. Jakku lacked books as much as it lacked water; I hadn’t known I needed both until I came to the island.

Kylo seemed sympathetic. _No books!_ but then he pounced: _Where is that island? Where are you Rey?_

_Nah-ah. Not telling._

* * *

I wasn’t enjoying life on Ahch-to so much. Nothing was happening, unless you count the creeping sense of dread I got whenever I thought about Snoke. Snoke, possibly getting closer. Meanwhile I had Kylo’s life to watch, like some holo-drama I could tune into whenever I got too bored. And drama it was. I have to admit it made compelling viewing.

Kylo and Spikey became lovers, of a sort. That made me queasy to think about. I really, really didn’t want to catch them in bed together. Mostly. Except I sort of did.

Clearly Kylo was preying on her, the poor lovestruck thing. And cheating on her: now I’d seen them together, I understood more of his feelings about me. I could add lust and dishonesty to his catalogue of crimes. It disturbed me, most of all when I felt my own heat rise in response to his.

He regretted he hadn’t done more when he’d had me at his mercy. More what? I tried to stamp out the part of me that wanted to know. I could get a good enough idea, watching him with Spikey. I tried not to. It made me wild with jealousy, and then furious with disgust at myself.

Spikey was tougher than she looked, though, and I came to see that Kylo did care for her. She was the first to understand that he was a prisoner too, for all his powers. A prisoner of Snoke’s will. She despised Snoke and he secretly approved the anarchy hidden in her heart. She thought and did things he couldn’t.

Except he _could!_  I wanted to scream at him. He could just _go!_ Snoke couldn’t hold him! But he kept choosing to force his neck into Snoke’s iron collar, the cur. I told him so, and felt the blackness and violence in him reach out to suck me down with him. He’d _make_ me see, he said. But I couldn’t. I only saw Han, falling from the bridge.

I realised what a difficult thing it was for them both. In all the world she was his only friend, and she was only that because she didn’t know about his crimes. She was a slave who must be discarded when he went on his next mission. He could not free her without breaking all the Dark-sider taboos. She was kind and made him laugh, and he couldn’t do a thing for her.

For her part, she longed for freedom above anything else. Even love looked like just another trap to her, like a cage she’d built for herself. She hoped Kylo could free her; for as long as he was in the palace and she served him, she had his protection from other people’s demands. She couldn’t help loving the power and glamour of him, like a wild animal that would consent to be held. She stayed away from the dark core of him, his past and his pain, knowing it would only cause her grief. Soon he’d be gone, and she’d return to serving people she despised.

So their love existed in the present tense only. It was sincere, and it was also doomed, and they both knew that.

Snoke had trained him not to want anything good, and so he held himself apart and lied to himself and pretended it didn’t matter. I could see how he destroyed himself, in this as in other things, and I hated Snoke more for it. I couldn’t like Kylo, but now I saw the torture Snoke put him through, I felt something change in me.

It had been Leia’s hope that the Force-bond would bring him to us. Unwelcome as it was, I began to see it as my duty to rescue Kylo, if only to undo the evil Snoke had done to him.

Instead I nearly destroyed him.

It was a night when I couldn’t sleep. Every anxiety seemed to be piling up at once. The grumbling conflict with the First Order, so close to igniting into full war. Finn would be on the front lines: He was too good a soldier and a leader not to. My parents, of whom I was only getting the smallest morsels of news in reports that always showed the trail going cold. Snoke’s presence, like a net that clogged my movements some days so I barely dared to move. He still hadn’t found me, but how long until he did? And Luke and I, still stuck here alone.

I reached out to Kylo, and he was asleep. I don’t know what happened, because this time I was in his dream, and it was terrible. I could feel the lightsaber go through Han Solo, again and again. I could feel his horror and loss and despair, and the iron grip of the will driving him, Snoke’s will. In my shock and terror, I screamed at Kylo through the Force bond.

_Why did you do it? Why did you kill Han?_

_I had to! It was the only way. I could only be safe if the Dark gave me all its power!_

Luke had told me about the dreams; now I’d seen for myself what Kylo’s dreams were like I was filled with hatred for Snoke in a way I’d never felt it before.

 _I bet that’s what Snoke told you_ , I said. Kylo argued that Snoke was only trying to protect him. His parents never had. They didn’t understand. But Snoke did. And Snoke told him how he must sacrifice everything, if he wanted the Dark’s protection from the terrible Force dreams.

 _I’d only ever had the one Force dream,_ I thought. _Just the one…the island. And the one I had on Takodana._

_YOU DON’T KNOW HOW LUCKY YOU ARE! All my dreams were like that. I dreamed I killed him a thousand times before I did it, and I’ve dreamed it again ever since._

Gungan gods, the misery in him. He’d done that, and it had given him nothing.

 _So Snoke was wrong! What else was he wrong about?_ I was yelling through the Force link. Kylo kept trying to argue that only Snoke understood, but I’d seen enough in his head to know it for a stinking pile of lies.

_Why was Snoke so interested in you? Do you think he did it out of kindness?_

He tried desperately to convince me that Snoke had been nothing but kind. Yet he’d driven Kylo to do terrible things, breaking down taboo after taboo. I could see his memories, the blood on his hands, the cruelties he’d inflicted, the furious ambition that Snoke had planted in him.

_Can’t you see how useful you are to him?_

_Yes, of course! He’s never lied to me about that. But we both want to be able to unlock the powers I’m capable of._

_That’s not the Sith way. It will always end in a fight to the death between the Master and his apprentice,_ I thought. He fought back desperately, claiming that was fine with him. It was an ancient tradition. He couldn’t expect me to understand. Only the strong deserved to survive, he said. Only through the hard schooling of conflict could a warrior achieve his true potential. It was all such pathetic, muddled rubbish.      

  
I thought of Finn, the greatest warrior I knew, and spat back at Kylo, _What are you, a child? To believe that?_

Kylo stopped. There is this thing about the Force-bond. Sometimes you’re not pushing or pulling or asking, you’re simply there, wholly and completely in the other person’s presence. He did this now, and I saw again the thing he’d revealed to me for an instant, long ago on the snows of Starkiller Base.

Awe.

He saw me as his hope beyond hope. But so far away that he didn’t know how he’d ever reach the light where I stood. My heart twisted in me. It’s not that I felt I deserved his worship, or anyone’s worship. But I couldn’t reject him either, even after wading through all the blood and cruelty of his memories.

 _How did you ever learn to be so fearless?_ he thought.

Fearless? Me? I had so many fears for the people I loved who might be hurt. But I was so, so glad to have them in my life, pain and all, and for once I found the words to say it.

_All these things make my world bigger, and they make the world mine. All the love, all the fear, all the sadness, all the joy. Much more than I could ever have imagined. Time and war could take everything and everyone from me, and yet in the end, my heart will only be enlarged._

_You are so small,_ I thought sadly. _Snoke said you could rule the world. And you made yourself a tiny box to live in._

I started to break the link, and then became aware of Spikey, who’d leapt out of Kylo’s bed like a scalded loth-cat from the force of his dream. In my shattered state I shouldn’t have tried to go into her head, but I did. I knew she’d been around Force-users a lot. Her siblings used to mindspeak with her, even though the gift was not hers. When I linked with her, Kylo’s dream of killing Han was at the front of my mind and she saw it and felt it. The effect on her was beyond awful.

Spikey’s mind made a jagged leap to thoughts of her sister, who had killed herself while training in Snoke’s notorious Dark Dojo. Her brother had already died during training. When I revealed what Kylo had done to his father, Spikey understood for the first time why her sister had died.

 _Snoke must have asked her to kill me in order to seal her loyalty to him,_ she thought with horror. _She killed herself instead._

Spikey wanted to die herself sometimes, she missed her sister so much. I hadn’t looked past the laughter and the music of her to see that core of sadness, always there.

Kylo was looking over at Spikey for some kind of comfort, but all Spikey could see was that he’d killed the father who loved him. A patricide, and all in the name of power.

“You did WHAT?!” she yelled at him. “You killed your father? You made him a SACRIFICE?”

And she was out of that room in a rush of fury and despair.

Maybe their love was doomed anyway, but I’d just killed it. Bludgeoned it to death.

I withdrew into my own body. It was the dark before dawn, and I couldn’t stay in bed any longer. I went out into a cold and velvety silence pricked by small rain, and ran down to the shore in the dark. I let the icy waves lick my feet with their punishing tongues.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This crosslinks to these chapters.
> 
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/6261889/chapters/15021811
> 
>  
> 
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/6261889/chapters/15067396
> 
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/6261889/chapters/15109933


	10. Touch and Go

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They can't stay there forever...
> 
> * * *

Leia’s face went white when I told her what had happened.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” I kept saying. I didn’t know enough about people. I’d messed everything up. I’d said all the wrong things. After a while Leia shook her head at me and flicked her hand at the screen.

“What’s done is done. No point dwelling on it Rey. Learn and move on.” She shut her eyes for a moment, looking for strength inside herself, I think. Luke put his hands on my shoulders and shoved me gently away from the screen. I took myself off to bed.

And there I stayed. I couldn’t seem to shake off the lethargy. Kylo had infected me with his dreams. Every time it seemed I would sleep, I was there instead, in some terrible storm of pain and fear. All the massacres, the terrible histories I’d been reading, rose up in front of me, only now I was part of them. Me, trampling the flowers underfoot. Me, smearing blood on my lips. Me, my voice hoarse from shouting a name.

“I don’t feel well,” I said miserably. Luke brought me chicken soup, but nothing could touch the chill inside me. I reached out for Kylo, but he seemed lost in dreams of his own, chasing some black ambition down endless corridors. Wanting to be invulnerable, immune to hurt. I should have felt for him but I didn’t.

_You’re just chasing yourself_ , I said bitterly. I tried to tell him the things Leia would have said: it was all Snoke’s fault, the bad dreams that had frightened him as a child, the things Snoke had made him do. But he hated himself too much to listen. He thought I was a child, and knew nothing of the crimes a man like him had committed. I knew Leia wanted me to argue, and I fought as hard as I could to make him see that he could come back to the Light. But he threw off the Force-link with terrible power. I realised then how strong he could be when he did something whole-heartedly. No wonder Snoke wanted to use him.

I fell into a dreamless sleep at last. Luke said I slept around the clock. I was woken at last by him bringing me tea.

“Ah, you’re awake. Feeling better?”

I was. But I was also full of a desire to leave. There was too much happening outside. We’d got as much from the archive as we ever would, I felt. There was a difference between rushing off half-cocked, and recognising when it was time to simply move, and trust that the Force would give us the answers we didn’t have yet.

“I feel it too, Rey,” said Luke, when I told him. “Something tells me our time here is up. I’ll call D’Qar and tell them to fetch us on the Millennium Falcon.

I wanted to jump in the X-wing and leave right away, but I knew it didn’t have the range, or room for both of us. Luke had used freighters to bring his X-wing close enough to reach Ahch-to, when he arrived all those years ago.

“I’m perfecting my hiding skills,” said Luke. “Test me.”

I shut my eyes and reached out with the Force. No Luke. Or…there he was. On Tatooine.

“That’s really wild,” I said. “I think you’ve done it.”

The next few days were torture. Something was happening in the Force, and our island was soaked with a sense of impending doom. Some black tatter of whatever Kylo was chasing had stuck to me, and I could not shake it off. In my dreams, every stone grew eyes to watch me. In waking, I kept turning with alarm, feeling the rocks of the island about to lose their places and roll down on me.

I didn’t want to reach out with the Force, but Luke made me do it. We had to know what was going on with Ben, he said. Something was upsetting the Force, and we shouldn’t fly blind into it. But I couldn’t reach him. He’d found a way to block me out. The Force-link was still there, like a stone in my shoe that I could never remove, but there was no way to use it to get into Kylo’s mind.

“Try Spikey then.”

I did, and what a mess I found.

All hell had broken loose. To say the First Order was awash with intrigue would not begin to describe it. General Hux and his ambitious relatives had found an angry, vengeful Spikey to be the perfect tool for their own plans, which involved assassinating Kylo without getting caught. She could get close to Kylo without arousing his suspicions, and Hux had Force-users on his side who could shield her intentions from Kylo’s notice.

She’d gone into it willingly enough but now it came down to doing the deed, she found she wasn’t a killer. She couldn’t hate Kylo enough to decapitate him in cold blood. But Hux would kill her if she didn’t, and Kylo was flying off planet that very day. So it was now or never.

_Help me! she_ cried, when she sensed my link to her.

I found myself having to defend Kylo to her, explaining how Snoke had worked on him.

_You’re his enemy. You should be delighted that I’m willing to kill Kylo,_ she countered. She still thought he should die anyway, for murdering his father.

_I shouldn’t have shown you Han’s death the way I did,_ I said, ashamed. _I was letting my frustration get on top of me, because Kylo is being so blind. I didn’t care about hurting you, and I’m sorry._

In the end, I couldn’t help her. She couldn’t tell me the location of the First Order palace, because she didn’t know. It was a secret even from its inhabitants.  
  
I wondered what to do. Everything I’d done was wrong so far. It was so easy to label people and that’s how mistakes happened. Servant, slave, lover. A nobody, just like I’d been a nobody. But she was also honey-tongued Spikey who sang rathtars to sleep, who’d woken whatever cracked remnants of sympathy still existed in Kylo Ren.

_You’ll have to tell Kylo what Hux planned, and throw yourself on his mercy._

_Kylo's mercy? Are you kidding me?_

_He’s the only one who can protect you,_ I said. Hoping I hadn’t sent her to her death. Between Hux and Kylo, her chances of survival looked pretty slim.

I could hope Kylo would at least give her a clean death. But he hadn’t always, in the past.

I remembered what Finn had said about Leia. General Organa. She knew what she was asking of her troops, when she sent them to face death. So I stayed with Spikey, riding lightly in her head as she went to confront Kylo. My nails were digging into my palms, and so were hers.

And it was a close thing, too. There was a moment when he struck her, and through her eyes I saw the same face I’d seen once pursuing Finn. Teeth bared in fury. She didn’t run, though. She grabbed him.

“Please just for ONCE do something for me. ONE thing. Protect me from the Huxes! I saved your life, Kylo!”

They stared at each other until I shook with the tension of it, sure I was about to witness her death. On my advice.

Finally he let go of her. “Dxun Dx’hit, I’m glad you told me. I don’t know how I can protect you but I’ll try. If it means wiping out all the Huxes, it’ll give me great pleasure.”

With a huge sigh of relief, I left them to it. Luke would want to know what had happened.

Luke was in his hut, making tea. He took one look at my face. I must have looked shattered, for he waved me to silence and poured me a cup.

“Drink, then tell.”

I drank, and told, between big gulps of tea. Strong, strong tea, with a warm bite to it.

“I thought there was no alcohol on Ahch-to,” I said when I finished.

“I sensed you might need it. Things have been getting weird lately.” He gave me an encouraging smile. A sweet, good man. What a waste, that the Galaxy had missed out on his presence all these years.

“I wish I was good at people, Luke. You would have known what to do right away.”

“With Ben? I doubt it. But you’re the one with the Force-link to Kylo, not me. And you’ve done okay, really. More than okay! Did you know, it’s pretty surprising that you can link to Spikey at all? The main thing is you were there for Spikey when she needed you, and your advice was good. And in the end, Ben let in the Light, didn’t he?”

I nodded, shakily. “Just a tiny crack.”

* * *

“Just a tiny crack,” proves that I don’t know as much about the Force as I should.

For the first time in weeks our island seemed entirely free of the clogging webs of threat that had grown so imperceptibly that they were only obvious once they were gone. It was a sign to us of how dangerously close Snoke’s attention had come to us.

It should have alerted us to the fact that Snoke’s attention was turned towards something else.

We went fishing, enjoying one of the perfect days of early spring. For once I wasn’t on edge in Luke’s flimsy boat. Or maybe I was so relieved to have lost that sense of dread we’d been feeling. Luke mentioned it.

“Kylo’s supposed to leave on some mission today. I expect he has to meet with Snoke to discuss it.” I frowned. “I’m annoyed that I didn’t manage to find out what the mission was. Leia could have done with the information, I’m sure. I told her to watch out around Endor, because that’s all I picked up.”

“Too much drama on ForceComms,” said Luke.

“Yeah. Like a love story, only not,” I said. “A love story revenge drama.”

Something walloped me behind my eyes with such force that I couldn’t see. I thought my eyes would fall out. When I opened them again, I could see Luke clutching his temples. All around us the sea stretched, level and calm under a blue sky. The boat floating as soft as a breath. Inside the Force, though, was a storm that seemed set to split our heads.

“By all the holy temples of…” Luke began wonderingly. But I screamed.

“He’s gone! He’s gone! Oh, my stars! He’s broken free!”

Free. He’d broken Snoke’s chains on his mind, and he had such power…even though he was still blocking our link, I could feel the rush of it. Snoke’s rage trailing it like a thundercloud, a bitter tang I recognised better than I should have.

“What happened?” asked Luke.

“I don’t know. But I know he’s going for a ship. He’ll be off-planet in minutes. Spikey too.”

We rowed to shore in a splashing frenzy that soaked us both and ran up to Luke’s hut. The comms unit was already flashing. Transmission incoming. Leia’s callsign. We slapped the call button together.

Leia’s face appeared on the screen, more animated than I’d ever seen her.

“What happened?” she said. “Did you feel it too?”

“Yes! Yes! He’s broken free of Snoke, can you tell?” We were both jumping up and down. “I don’t know how, or why. He’s still blocking me. But he’s trying to leave the planet, he had a ship…”

Leia looked at Luke over my shoulder. “I don’t know why I believed…” she stopped a moment, and a beatific smile spread over her face. “But I always did believe. Deep down.”

With seven words she wiped out the years of sleepless nights and worry. Made them as though they had never existed. Now there was only the future, and what she could do with it. I saw the strength in her that made her such a powerful leader.

Her eyes moved back to my face and I felt the pressure of her will before she even spoke.

_“Now find him!”_

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	11. General Organa and Kylo Ren

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Part II
> 
> Kylo's free, but Snoke is still his creepy stalker. Meanwhile on D'Qar...
> 
> * * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time to find out what is happening to other people in the Galaxy
> 
> * * *

“Take those out and pile them up in front of Hangar Seven,” said General Organa.

She was pointing to a pile of bottles stacked up behind her quarters. Her dead soldiers, she called them. Every one of them had died for the Resistance, she often said. Nobody had a sense of humour blacker than hers. But then again, she’d fired and been under fire often enough, felt the sizzle of blaster fire pass her by to snuff out some other life. She’d drunk manic toasts with the survivors, never enough to make it okay.

“We are the Resistance. We don’t drink the blood of our enemies,” she’d say, holding a glass of ruby wine up to the light. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t drink!”

C3PO had once calculated that she couldn’t drink one bottle for every soldier who had died under her command within her probable human lifespan. He never mentioned it again after the red-hot tongue-lashing she gave him for that observation.

Nobody could say she wasn’t honest. She didn’t conceal who she was. Lies and concealment were the spawn of the evil that brought down the Republic, she said. The Galaxy was a mess. Nobody should try to face it sober. So sometimes, the General drank, and she didn’t care who knew it. Come what may, she’d be at the morning briefings, punctual and gimlet-eyed, white uniform immaculate. Hands dancing over the holomaps of the Galaxy, with its traceries of alliances, threats and deployments. A decisive finger stabbing here and here and here as she tried to cut through the webs she saw strangling the Galaxy.

The pile of bottles was very large. C3PO enlisted the help of a few carrier droids, and they stacked the bottles up into a glistening pyramid at one end of the Resistance compound on D’Qar. As the pyramid grew, more and more Resistance troops dawdled past and then outright stopped what they were doing in order to watch. Their general came out to direct operations, and then ordered the door to Hangar Seven opened. X-wings stood ranked in the shadows.

Poe happened to be the nearest fighter pilot. Or maybe it was not coincidence. Poe was the quickest to catch on to the General’s fey mood, and the least afraid of it.

“Poe. Climb into one of those X-wings and fire on that, please,” she ordered, pointing to the bottle pyramid. He saluted, turned and managed to strike just the right kind of ceremonial swagger as he walked over to the hangar. The gathered crowd heard the hum of the X-wing’s systems warming up. A few moments later a bolt of blue-white light streaked across the ground and turned the bottles into an incandescent fountain of molten glass. A few people danced away from the falling droplets of fire, batting at them with their hands.

The General stood for a few minutes watching her one weakness cool to a pile of slag. Unconsciously, she’d pulled a small black rock out of her pocket and was tossing it lightly up and down in one hand. It was another piece of slag: a chunk of basalt skimmed by a fighter pilot from the exploding Starkiller Base. A truly awful trophy, she often thought, wondering whether it was statistically possible that there were a few atoms of her husband melted onto it. C3PO could have told her, but she would never ask. Instead she turned to him.

“There are more bottles in my quarters. Have them taken to the mess hall. They can be distributed at dinner tonight.”

“Am I to infer that you have ceased to require alcoholic beverages?”

“Yes,” said Leia, with a slight smile. She didn’t offer any further explanations, but turned and walked back to her quarters. The crowd in the compound dispersed with a buzz of speculation. Whatever her actions meant, the consensus was that it was good news.

Finn’s gaudily-painted training squad arrived at the end of the scene with the long loping strides he’d drilled into them. Seeing Poe strolling out of the hanger, Finn dismissed his troops and went up to him.

“What was that all about?”

“I don’t know,” said Poe, grinning. “I’d say, ‘watch out, First Order’.” He slid Finn a conspiratorial look and linked arms with him. They wandered as though by accident past Leia’s quarters. A stray beam of sunshine escaped the clouds of D’Qar, illuminating her figure in the window. She was holding a holocube up to her face. The men ambled past before she could catch them looking in.

“That’s the one of Han Solo celebrating some win, isn’t it?” Finn asked.

“Yeah, I think so. Happy days,” said Poe.

Inside the room, Leia smiled slightly at the image in front of her. Normally this side of the cube was turned to the wall. It showed a gangly-looking boy with a shock of black hair and shadows under his eyes, too self-conscious to smile for the camera.

She made as though to touch the boy’s nose with one fingertip, then put the cube back on its shelf, with the boy’s image facing outward this time.

"See you soon," she murmured.

  
* * *

Kylo Ren’s ship had never had a name. It was just known as Ren’s ship. An upsilon-class shuttle capable of carrying six people, but manageable with a crew of one. This one providentially fitted with its own hyperdrive so that Kylo didn’t have to rely on the Finalizer. Months of nagging the First Order shipyards had paid off, just in time to make his escape. Strange how things worked out sometimes. He felt a smile of triumph pulling at the corners of his mouth whenever he thought of it. Hux must have been spitting when he found out how neatly Kylo had escaped.

 _Call it the Flappy Dactillion!_ Rey had suggested a few days ago, prodding him over the Force link. He’d decided to stop shielding himself from her. It was lonely on the ship, with Spikey gone.

 _Its wings go up and down, like a bird_ …Rey teased him. Her mocking tone tried to cover her dislike for the ship. She had fearful memories of it swooping down on her on Takodana, and the skirmish that had ended in her capture.

_Dactillions? What have you been reading? Does your Jedi training really involve so much natural history?_

She seemed obsessed with learning about Galactic creatures. Living on that island with Luke had made her drunk with life, and half the time when they made the Force link, it was because she was too busy mooning over some seagull or flowercrab to block him.

_Flappy Steelpecker?_

_No_

_Millennium Falcon Two?_

_Fuck off!_ He broke the link. She was just trying to get his goat. His break with Snoke hadn’t made them instant best friends.

Kylo’s ship was a thoroughbred. Unfortunately, like any thoroughbred, it was highly strung. It needed the First Order’s engineer corps to fix and fine-tune its sensitive systems after every mission.

Now it just has me, thought Kylo. Too bad.

So here he was, stuffed into a pressure suit, floating next to its uptilted wings. The Galaxy was a careless mess of jewels far below him. If he didn’t get the ship going, nobody was going to find him by accident.

Except maybe Rey and Luke. They’d come looking for him, once they managed to get off that wretched island. But escaping Snoke didn’t mean he was ready to jump into the arms of the Resistance. He wanted to find Rey on his own terms, not have her and Luke scoop him up and carry him off to D’Qar like a trophy.

So he’d better fix this ship.

Remembering how to fix things involved remembering his father. He had his father’s natural gift for mechanical things, and memories of working on things with him. They were a better guide than the Force, which might fix things in ways that proved lethal to humans. So he was reduced to kludging a fix for a broken coolant vane using his natural intelligence, the Force, and his father’s teaching. It was an exercise in discomfort. A discordant music, as Spikey would have said.

He’d taken a break to ignore the problem and float for a while, his mind as empty as he could make it, while his eyes traced the smoking coils of the Galaxy in all its glory. To float like this, empty of intentions, was as difficult as it was precious. His mind was all too open to memories, or other voices.

He missed Spikey, who had turned down the chance to be his sidekick in a life of Galactic high adventure. She’d be utterly useless at it. Come back alive, she’d said, and she’d write a ballad about him that nobody would forget. Meanwhile she was either singing and playing the chitarra on Fariol, or running a fish fry bar. Or eating bon-bons while some rich admirer gave her foot massages. So long as she could make music and nobody was shooting at her, she would be happy enough.

He supposed he should be happy for her, but it was an imperfect world and he was an imperfect person. It felt like she’d abandoned him. “Go find Rey,” she’d said airily as she went off.

That was unfair. Leaving had been hard, and if he wanted to tune into hypercasts from Fariol, he could hear how she really felt about it. Her songs of scorching heartbreak were becoming popular among on certain channels. Parting without hard feelings was possibly the most unlikely thing they could have done. They were unlikely people.

If only Rey were easy to find! Alone in a forest glade somewhere. Swimming in some jewel-like lake. He could imagine a thousand ways and places he’d like to meet her. In reality she’d probably snarl and reach for her lightsaber as soon as she saw him. Still, dreams were free.

They did talk over the Force bond, the safety of distance making them less adversarial. Sometimes it was like calling out to somebody in the next room. Sometimes it was like sending out a fishing lure and watching it sink to the depths, ignored. The latter image came from Rey, who had spent a lot of time fishing on Luke’s island, from what he could gather.

Here she came now, sharing his vision of the curdled stars below. She was in a good mood.

 _So bright,_ she said. _We could see beautiful stars on Jakku too. The desert air was so clear. But we couldn’t see the whole Galaxy laid out like that._

Her quiet pleasure at the sight warmed him a little. He stretched out as fully as he could, reaching out with his fingers and toes and spinning gently in a big X across the stars. The ship reared up next to him, dimly starlit.

The sight of it still gave Rey a little jab of fear. The big black ship that had swooped down on her once.

 _Are you floating in space? Why?_ she asked.

He explained the problem with the heat dump fins and felt Rey’s interest spark. Her admiration for nature hadn’t driven out her love of mechanical things. Both had form and function, equally interesting to her.

_Show me._

He crooked his fingers as though the Force were a skein of yarn and reeled himself along it to the offending wing. Rey felt eerily close right now, as though she were floating over his shoulder.

 _Is that an access port there, like a lid? Can you open it?_ she asked. He sensed her impatience as he fumbled it open. She hadn’t tried working with pressure suit gloves, he thought, irritated, and stabbed at the catches with the Force. That worked. She ignored his mood and traced the circuits she could see through his eyes. Nope, nothing.

_What about the hinge where the coolant vane turns? Is it moving smoothly?_

_It’s been balky. I’ve brushed space dust out of the moving parts already,_ he replied. He punted over to give her a closer look.

_That looks clean now. But space dust shouldn’t be getting through your shields like that. I think the problem is starting somewhere else._

They worked over the ship’s external systems in amicable near-silence. As amicable as they could be, anyway. Surface thoughts, firmly fixed on the present. Amazing how well they could work together.

 _You’re going to have to dump some pent-up energy,_ said Rey. _Go round the other side so you’re shielded by the ship, and trip the switches with the Force._

He did as she suggested, feeling her attention on the ship as he circled it. She was finding a grudging admiration for it. Sleeker and more modern than her ship. Shame it was so “nervy”, as she called it.

 _I’m tripping the switch now,_ he said. He lay back on a pillow of vacuum, looking up at the ship, and felt with a Force hand to where the power conduit they’d worked on snaked around the other side. He flicked the switch, and reflected light flared suddenly on the exposed surfaces above him. We’ll see if that works.

Rey’s presence stayed by him as he relaxed and stretched again, drinking in the sight of the stars. Kylo was lucky: he didn’t get space sick. So she was enjoying the freedom of it as much as he was, with the added pleasure of novelty. She’d never experienced null gravity before.

Their moment of poise was broken by a black grip that closed suddenly on his mind. Rey was gone from the link faster than one of her wary fish.

 _Missed_ , he thought drily. The stars below seemed to darken, but it was all in his mind. Snoke, suddenly present.

 _Imagine all the people in the Galaxy like those stars. All making something beautiful together, instead of fighting,_ said Snoke. _He sent something along the link, like a blast of choir music. Everyone together, in harmony, like the stars of the Galaxy, he repeated. If we had the power to make a unity, how much more beautiful it would be!_

That was a new tack from Snoke. Kylo shut him out before he could elaborate.

He was slightly worried. He knew of one other person that thought in music. He hoped Snoke hadn’t found her.

 

 

 


	12. More Things You Wish You Didn't Know

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Find Ben!" said Leia. Rey is less than keen. Kylo's problems are Galaxy-sized, and she's just a girl from Jakku.
> 
> * * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "It should make you shake and sweat,  
> nightmare you, strand you in a desert  
> of irrevocable desolation, the consequences  
> seared into the vein..."
> 
> From Brian Turner's poem "Sadiq" in his anthology, "Here Bullet", which I highly recommend. Full poem here:
> 
> http://onviolence.com/?e=276
> 
> * * *

Sometimes on Jakku when a sandstorm came, I was trapped for days at a time inside my AT-AT or in some wreck I was salvaging. I learned to wait, swallowing my impatience as I hoarded my water and my food. Waiting for the Millennium Falcon to collect us from Ahch-to was nearly as hard. It took forever! 

Meanwhile, Kylo was clearer to me, now he was in space. I went to the archives and consulted the old Jedi map of the Galaxy again, looking for him. The map bucked under my hands with the Force I brought to bear on it, and a flickering line went up to a point above the Galactic plane. Somewhere about Chalcedon. Maybe I could track him down if I really wanted to. I didn’t.

Most evenings, the hypercomm crackled to life. Luke and Leia talked over politics and policies. I hovered around, fascinated by Leia. She was tough and wily, but you could warm your hands by her smile, if she gave it to you. Leia would call me over if she caught sight of me over Luke’s shoulder.

“Any luck finding Ben?”

“No, nothing certain. He’s moving around a bit,” I said evasively.

“Has he got Spikey with him?”

“No, she wanted to do something else. She’s on Fariol.”

“It can’t be good for Ben to be so isolated. He’s been on his own too much already.”

“I loved it,” muttered Luke. “Didn’t harm me.” Leia frowned at him and he gave her a big cheesy grin in response. He backed up a little when she bared her teeth at him. 

I had the feeling I’d seen that teeth-bared look before somewhere. Family resemblances…

“Is Finn there?” I asked, to dispel the tension. Leia broke off her staring match with Luke.

“Yes, but he can’t talk right now. He’s talking to a warlord we captured. They’d been harassing some of our Sullustan allies. Finn’s good at finding out what the First Order’s been up to.”

“Like….an interrogation?” I asked. The idea made me uneasy.

“No. He has a knack. They’ll talk to him. He’s a soldier, they recognise him.”

Luke pushed past me, muttering something about bringing in the chickens. There was a storm due tonight, he said. Leia gave him a little wave through the screen, and fixed her eyes on me. There was something between us. Everyone on D’Qar said she had the Force, but nobody could say what she did with it, exactly. All I could say was that she was very present to me, even if she was light years away.

“Rey, forgive me if I’m pushing you too much, but….you’re not looking for Ben very hard, are you?”

I could feel myself blushing, unnerved by her: a small woman with an implacable will under all her kindness to me. The silence stretched, until I had to blurt out the thoughts that had been bothering me.

“How can you forgive him after what he did to Han? To your husband? Wasn’t he the love of your life?”

“He was!” said Leia, and for a second she was fighting back tears, which shocked me. She hadn’t expected me to be so direct. Then she pulled herself together, leaning in close to the screen. “But Ben was the light of my life.”

She stared off into the distance, into the past. “People say their children are bright, and by that they mean they’re clever. But in Ben, the brightness was something more; a real shining. A hunger to know, a way of seizing on life with such excitement. Everything was new to him, like it is to any child, I suppose. But he lit up, truly he did. If he loved something or hated it, it was with his whole heart. So much joy and so much courage in everything he took on.

“You are like that too, you know. And Finn. I saw it in you both right away,” she said.

She had it too. For the first time I recognised Kylo’s energy as a distorted reflection of it. All that passion and commitment turned to anger.  
 “He was so open-hearted,” Leia went on. “But I was away, and Snoke took advantage. Walked right into that open heart.

“All those years when I was fighting in the Senate, everyone must have thought I was so hard,” Leia continued. “A hard woman. But you see, in my thoughts, I always had my family, and I did it all for them. I’d build them a better Galaxy, I thought, and it would be worth it.

“While I was on Coruscant, or wherever I had to go, I dreamt of my little nest, with my husband and my boy. It was something other women had, that I thought I’d never have. A safe nest that I went back to when I finished fighting all the enemies of peace.

“For so long I believed in my safe nest. I kept believing, when I should have been watching the signs.”

She shook her head with a grimace. “I lied to myself. I won’t lie to you. I _did_ see the signs, but I fought to ignore them instead of fighting to keep my family safe.”

Leia looked older than I’d ever seen her. In a very quiet voice she said, “I loved my boy. He was my shining light, and I wasn’t there when he needed me. Can you see why I want him back so much?”

“But he isn’t that person any more,” I said miserably. “He tortures people.”

“And what is that like for him?” Leia fixed me with a look I couldn’t meet. “Ask him,” she said, more gently. 

The thought horrified me. 

“What good would that do? He hates himself enough without letting me see those memories!” I said.

Leia sighed. “You may be young, but I see your courage.”

“What?” I said blankly.

“He’d be a monster if he _didn’t_ hate himself for doing those things. You’ll see. Tell Luke I said good night.”

She leaned forward and turned off the hypercomm.

The Force works in mysterious ways. Only once before had the Force-bond taken me into Kylo’s dreams. That night it happened again, and Leia’s last, troubling question seemed to have taken root in my mind, pulling memories out of Kylo’s mind that filled me with horror.

This was a dream of the first time Kylo Ren had to interrogate somebody. He felt his victim’s fear and hate and pain, and it flooded his mind, as his mind entered theirs. The more he pushed and forced, the more their pain and fear reflected back to him, until he was like a man in an echoing room, shouting and shrieking his pain, and their pain, and there was no distinction between what he felt and they felt, just endless echoes building and amplifying.

Louder and louder, worse and worse, in a feedback loop that became ever more unbearable.

_Make it stop!_

He’d give anything make it stop.

 _Don’t do it! Just leave! You don’t have to do anything!_ I screamed. But he couldn’t hear me.

And behind it all Snoke’s voice, Snoke’s will, saying, “End it. Finish this. Kill him.” His presence a black wall behind us.

Killing his victims was the only relief he could think of; Snoke had cut off the possibility of imagining he could just walk away.

Kill them, to release his own mind from their pain and fear.

Kylo began to wake, and I fled before he could become aware of me. I was ashamed of seeing something so excruciatingly personal. By rights it was _he_ who should be ashamed, but I was the one who felt tainted. I couldn’t imagine what he felt, awaking from such dreams.

For the next few nights I was afraid to sleep, and paced the high windy hilltop for as long as I could, needing to see the stars wheeling in freedom above me. My heart felt sick.

* * *

Our hypercomm talks with D’Qar became difficult. Everybody wanted something different. Leia wanted her brother back, as a Jedi figurehead for the Resistance, or simply somebody to stand by her side. Luke wanted to hunt down Snoke, with my help. Leia wanted me to help bring back her son, as though the Force-bond were a line that I could pull, and Kylo would come bobbing along after me like a fishing float. That’s not what he wanted. 

He wanted the Force-bond to make me his. He’d been owned by Snoke, and he’d owned Spikey, and I don’t think he remembered how to be close to people any other way. I couldn’t be Spikey, as weak as water and twice as tricky. If anyone put a yoke on me I’d fight.

I realise now that not knowing my family doesn’t mean I don’t know who I am. I’d made my own soul on Jakku, the way you can in an empty place with no memories. I know who I am better than most. 

I saw that both Finn and Kylo lived with voices in their heads telling them what they should think and who they should be. I was in no hurry to meet Kylo until he’d figured out who he was. He’d rebelled against his family, and he’d rebelled against Snoke, and now he didn’t know what else was left. That’s what he seemed to be doing, floating out in space somewhere in his ship. Finding himself.

Along the bond that linked me to Kylo, I could feel his mind darkening around the edges as the days went by. Other voices whispering, ghosts in his mind. His own words to me were hot and bright, but a shadowy chorus echoed his thoughts sometimes, mocking or contradicting him. Accusing voices, guilty memories. Things from out of his dreams that I couldn’t admit to knowing, so how could I talk about them?

 _Are you okay?_ I asked once. He brushed my question away angrily. But then came circling back, pleased that I’d cared enough to ask. He admitted he was finding the emptiness of space hard to bear.

 _It’s driving me crazy,_ he said, trying to make light of it. Trying to play down how much he craved company, even if it were only through our Force-bond.

I didn’t think the emptiness of space was to blame for his problems. But it was too early to talk about seeking forgiveness. My stars, I tried, and a fat lot of good that did!

 _You know what you need to do,_ I said. _Han went to get you because Leia sent him. They both wanted you back._

Kylo’s response was an explosion of anger and confusion. In his mind, Leia loomed up as a terrible contradictory figure, unpredictable, smothering, demanding. A mother who would eat her own children if she needed to. I could sense the distorting lens of Snoke’s lies right there, but Kylo couldn’t see it.

_She's a little old woman, Kylo. Smaller than me._

_Fuck off!_

It made me realise what a rare gift Finn had, managing to see through the First Order’s lies despite years of indoctrination. A warm heart and a cool head. He’d bided his time, behaving the same as everyone around him and waiting to understand who he truly was. He’d waited even longer for the chance to act as that person. He was incredibly strong, to hide and protect the secret person he was inside.

Finn was really the one I wanted to talk to. Instead I got Kylo, tugging at the Force bond.

_Rey!_

_What? Are you bored or something? Go home, Leia wants to see you._

He would’ve struck me, if we’d been in the same room. As it was, he was quite vicious, saying I would understand if I’d had a family. They weren’t all the heavenly gift I seemed to imagine.

But I was bored too. Bad as our conversations were, I stuck around for more. I was stuck on a rainy island, and he could show me the stars. Wherever he was, it was beautiful. The Galaxy below him like a floor, studded with jewels. 

Once I linked to him when he was floating outside the ship, fixing it. We worked on it together. Other times, I found myself telling him things about our life on the island. The ordinary things we did were interesting or new to him. 

_No, they’re not new to me,_ he corrected me. _I’ve seen Endorian chickens before. I like watching the way they come up to you, that’s all. I didn’t know they were so funny._

I held one in my lap and scratched its topknot while it crooned sleepily at me, and far away I could feel Kylo smile. 

But a couple of times our talks ended because I felt something dark moving towards me through the link. I knew instinctively that I needed to leave NOW. Snoke, somehow _there,_ making a grab for my mind. I hoped Kylo was safe.

When the Millennium Falcon finally appeared, it plunked gracelessly out of the clouds in a way that made my heart sink. Something was wrong. Its hull was peppered with black marks.

We’d packed up our belongings weeks ago, ready to go, so we threw the last few things in our bags and toted them down to the Falcon, still eating our lunch as we went. Chewie was already waiting for us, wreathed in steam from the landing gear. He roared a greeting.

“Hi Chewie. What took so long?” asked Luke.

Chewie told us he’d had to deliver some long range scanner equipment to a new Resistance base on the way. It was under attack when he arrived. Artoo had flown the ship, even though the cockpit wasn’t set up for him, while Chewie manned the guns. They might have saved the base, which had a lot of diggers and construction machinery but almost no defences. It all sounded quite exciting.

Artoo came out while Chewie was describing the battle, and informed us that the Falcon had been damaged. They’d made it to Koba Station, which was a miserable dump populated by suspicious and uncooperative losers, Artoo said. Chewie had been reduced to threatening everyone with violence until he could find somebody who would admit to having the parts they needed. It wasn’t a good repair, and Chewie and Artoo wanted to work on it some more before taking off again.

Luke and I stowed our gear in the cabins, and then helped Chewie and Artoo go over the Falcon inch by inch. I was so desperate to go that it was hard to focus on the machinery under my hands. I kept dropping things.

“We’d better get this this right. I don’t want to stop anywhere on the way back to D’Qar,” said Luke, teasing out a piece of cabling that had become fused into its housing. “It sounds like things are getting more unstable by the day. We don’t know where the safe ports are any more.” I tried not to snarl at him in response. 

The war was a problem for another day, I told myself. Right now, we were fixing the Falcon and by this time tomorrow I’d be deep in hyperspace, on my way to D’Qar. 

* *


	13. She's Off!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey's got the Millennium Falcon's joystick in her hands again. Whoosh!  
> Kylo's shipping Rey but he still talks to Spikey. Maybe he loves her too, but he could do without the nagging, he thinks.
> 
> * * *

_You’re off!_

He felt it along the Force bond as soon as she left the planet. Her joy, watching the ocean drop away beneath her, and the steady pounding pulse of the Millennium Falcon’s sublight engines. He drank in that joy along the Force-link that seemed to have opened of its own accord between them.

He was so tired of his empty ship, which was starting to fill with a darkness all its own. For weeks after leaving the First Order he’d felt drunk with freedom. Now he was almost paralysed by it. There were so many bad choices he could make.

But Rey was living entirely in the present. Feeling what she felt through the Force-link was almost as good as breathing in the scent of her skin, (something he often imagined doing). He felt her heart rise at the power under her hands, the controls responding to her. The jolt of excitement as the flat plate of the planet’s surface changed, becoming a great blue bowl, part of a sphere.

_One of the thrusters is a little off, though_. _Watch it….he thought._

_I know, I know. The Falcon was caught in a battle on the way here. I have to keep adjusting it until we can get a proper repair,_ she said ruefully.

_It must have patches on its patches by now,_ he replied. Suppressing the sour cocktail of feelings he had about his father's ship. Better she had it. It made her happy.

_It goes beautifully still. We’re taking really good care of it_ , she replied, misreading him. A slight pause. She knew she’d made a false step. He shrugged, which she could sense if not see.

_It doesn’t matter._

It did matter. But what could she do about it, anyway? And where was she taking the Millennium Falcon now?

As soon as she left Luke’s mysterious hidden planet, he felt the stifling veil hiding her location fall away. Something on the planet had been hiding her and Luke, just as he’d been hidden on Snoke’s planet. But it was still no use searching for her. Every time he tried to pin her down, the Force broke and bent in all directions, suggesting she was here, there and everywhere. That was a useful trick, he thought.

_Where are you, Rey?_ His hands poised on the controls of his ship, ready to swoop down on her if she told him. But of course she’d have Luke with her.

_Go away!_ She broke the link.

Which left him nobody to talk to. He’d been alone in his nameless ship for weeks. A stinking and increasingly unreliable womb from which he would emerge either crazy or reborn, he thought.

_You were born once. You bet that had to hurt. You survived once, you can do it again,_ was Rey’s response, when he said things like that. Some days he thought of her as the umbilical cord tethering him to sanity. When that idea leaked across the link to her, he felt her mental shudder in response. To her, he was a dead weight around her neck. His family insisted she was responsible for him. She dragged the responsibility around with her with ill grace, seeing it as the price of her escape from bondage on Jakku.

_I’m dying here. I feel like I’m going crazy_ , he told her.

_Death is also a midwife,_ she said, obscurely. She was all of what, 20 now? It didn’t matter how strong she was with the Force, it didn’t make her Kylo Ren’s life coach. She didn’t know shit about fixing people, he thought.

It was lucky they were both getting better at concealing their thoughts, because he didn’t want her to know about the child. The smug and placidly malicious child that appeared to live in his ship.

Though of course there was no child. He’d spent an hour rampaging round the ship swearing at that selfish little jerk that was eating his supplies and leaving the wrappers everywhere, with no thought for the future or concern for how difficult it was to resupply, and just laughing about it where he thought Kylo couldn’t hear. Or maybe it was a girl, it was hard to tell.

No, he’d left those wrappers there himself. He remembered now. While he was fixing the conduits to the hyperwave comm scanner. Aircon must have moved them. There was no child. What an idiot.

Had _he_ damaged the conduits? While searching for that maddening whisper?

_You can’t tell can you?_ said that piping voice. He wanted to strangle it.

_Let me tell you a secret,_ it went on. _You’re not going crazy. You always were crazy._ Followed by a stifled titter.

Kylo threw himself shoulders-first into a bulkhead, and rebounded into another, fists folded against his chest so he wouldn’t destroy anything. The walls gave a satisfying echo at the impacts, but he didn’t dare touch anything with his hands lest the Force jump out of them. The ship was falling apart as it was. He kicked a door and dented it. Boom!

The child’s voice turned into a whimpering shriek, now sounding like a baby rather than a child. Moaning with fear.

“If I find you, I’ll really give you something to cry about!” he yelled, and slammed through the dented door in search of the noise. It cut off with a sudden sob, as if slapped into silence. “Serves you right, you little fucker! Not so brave now, are you?” He kicked a line of dents along the walls from stem to stern of the ship. Twice. Then he sank down onto the floor, head in his hands. Eyes shut. Spots dancing behind his eyelids. He tried to read them, but they didn’t tell him anything.

Sometimes if you stare at spots of mould on the ceiling, they take some form. A creature, a monster, a face. These days, if Snoke came into his mind, it was like that. Or like lifting a rock and discovering something rotten flourishing behind it on the side you couldn’t see. Slime, or some fungus, growing where it thought you wouldn’t find it. He thought he’d eradicated Snoke’s link to him but it turned out that a lifetime of Snoke whispering in his mind left a bond that was not so easy to destroy.

_Surely you don’t want to spend your life snivelling on the floor,_ said a concerned voice. _Give me your hand, let me help you up. Even if you don’t serve me any more, I can’t abandon you to this! It’s so humiliating! You were like a son to me. Let me shield you from these attacks._

Snoke again. He was trying different personas, Kylo noticed. Seeing if there was one that could hook Kylo in. Kylo’s powers had grown, though. These days he could push back against the link and see further into Snoke’s mind than he realised. Snoke wanted Rey. To him, Kylo was nothing more than a key in the lock that was Rey. Rey would open doors that….it wasn’t clear, but Snoke was planning something that hadn’t been tried before.

“Get out,” he said aloud, shutting Snoke down. He had the power to do that now. That was something, anyway. The problem was, Snoke kept sneaking back in.

Maybe he should eat something. He’d feel better.

A few minutes later he was sitting in the _Flappy Dact_ — in the shuttle’s cramped galley, eating rations. He didn’t really taste things lately. It was more an exercise for his jaws, and it quieted the growling in his stomach. Then he could think more clearly.

Rey said that Snoke had given Kylo the terrible dreams that had darkened his childhood. That he had put the fear into Kylo so that he could offer him relief from it. For a long time he’d fought against the idea with all his strength. Rey was just repeating what she’d heard, brainwashed by Luke and Leia, he thought.

But as time went on he had to admit her words had the bitter taste of truth, so bitter it constricted his throat with the sense of how he’d wasted his life as a result.

The child, though…was this hallucination another trick of Snoke’s? He didn’t think so, but how could he tell?

Maybe Rey would know, but he was afraid to ask her. Rey had compassion but no pity. He emerged from some conversations with her battered and half-drowned, as though he’d swum in the cold salt seas of her island home. She didn’t fare much better with him, either. His knowledge and experience of the greater Galaxy left her trampled and dispirited. He knew that, but he couldn’t resist showing it off to her anyway.

_You’re just a girl from Jakku. Come, and I’ll show you the Galaxy._ The wrong tack, but he couldn’t help it sometimes.

If he could catch her without Luke around! He badly wanted to fight her again. He was stronger than her, more skilled, and much bigger. Next time he wouldn’t give her the advantage. He’d make a deal that if she won, she had to come with him for a year. She seemed like the type to stick to a bargain.

He imagined how they’d fight until she had to submit. She’d be injured, but he’d heal her. They’d travel the Galaxy together and see marvellous things. He’d save her from a terentak and she’d realise he wasn’t a bad person.

Cheered up by his daydreams, he drew his lightsaber and fought an imaginary Rey all over the ship, fast and delicate as a dancer. With perfect control he just barely scored the wall panels with the tip of the saber, hardly leaving a mark.

The hypercomm chimed, and the screen crackled. A message from Fariol, gibberish for a second and then clearing, unencrypted.

“Liberty Belle?” it said. Still cryptic, but he surmised that this was Spikey, also trying to come up with a name for his ship. Not Hux, or somebody similarly unwelcome. A few times Kylo had made the mistake of answering a call on the unencrypted band, only to receive death threats from some slavering bounty-hunter in Hux’s pay.

“Thanks for your input, two weeks late,” he muttered. Or was it a month, now? He hit the “respond” button anyway, and Spikey’s face appeared on the screen, in 2D but full colour. She looked somehow sleeker but otherwise unchanged. No, that wasn’t true. She looked happier. Happiness sat on her like a gloss. If he’d done everything else wrong in his entire life, he’d done one thing right, freeing her.

Perhaps he looked different, because the first words out of her mouth when she saw him were, “Are you okay?”

“Fine, thanks,” he lied.

“Oh good. Do you like Liberty Belle?”

“It’s better than Flappy Dactillion, which was Rey’s suggestion. Or Flappy Steelpecker.”

“Flappy — What?”

“The stabiliser wings go up and down. She’s obsessed with birds. Or living things in general.”

Spikey’s face squinched up into an aww-so-cute expression. “That’s adorable. Have you found her yet?”

“No,” he snapped. “Why are you calling?”

“Morse found a comms unit at the school that could take the encryption module without frying itself. So we called. Hey, I’m at music school now.”

“What’s that like?” asked Kylo. Spikey’s life was weird enough to be interesting. Figuratively as well as literally light years away from his life.

“Ugh. My chitarra teacher makes me work so hard. Everything I play, it’s never good enough. He’s so mean to me!”

“Shall I tell Morse and the boys to have a word with him?” asked Kylo, imagining some vicious ogre hitting Spikey with a notepad. Spikey looked horrified.

“No! He has to be like that! I’m terrible, I really am. I have so much work to do to catch up!”

Morse appeared on the screen over Spikey’s shoulder and sat down in front of the camera. He was one of the three First Order soldiers unexpectedly drawn into Spikey and Kylo’s escape from the First Order. Kylo had sent them down to Fariol with her, with orders to keep her safe, or else.

“I don’t know why she wanted to be free so much. She locks herself in a room to practice scales for hours. Freedom’s wasted on her.” Kylo heard a squawk of laughter from Spikey, off-screen. He wondered whether Morse was sleeping with her. Probably not.

“Has she got a boyfriend?” he asked anyway.

“Pah, no! Like I said, freedom’s wasted on her.”

“How would you even know?” yelled Spikey, and shoved her way back onscreen.

“Because you would tell _everyone_ if you did. And you’d be asking my advice all the time,” said Morse, laughing.

“Oh. True,” said Spikey. She turned to Kylo. “I did ask his advice this _one_ time, because I don’t know any other men round here except Deepal and Sorgen, and they’re useless. He was very good. With advice, I mean.”

“Well it was simple. Sleep with the guy or not. You don’t have to make such a meal out of every decision!” said Morse.

“So did you?” said Kylo.

“No!” Spikey seemed scandalised. “He had a nice voice, but he was so _thick!_ What are you doing, anyway?”

“Nothing much. I have to get more supplies soon, so I suppose I’ll have to raid some fleapit space station.”

“How will you do that? Don’t you have a price on your head? Don’t people get a bit suspicious when they see a First Order elite shuttle landing on their pad?”

“I use the Force,” said Kylo smugly. “And threats.”

Spikey was a lot easier to impress than Rey. He wanted to reach through the screen and lay one of his space-white hands against the coppery brightness of her cheeks, which looked so full of marvellous colour and health. He wanted to see her laugh.

“Oh! So now you’re a pirate?” Spikey asked, and launched into a few lines of an irritating song he remembered from his childhood.

_“Oh, I am a pirate king, ’tis such a thing, a pirate king!”_ she trilled.

“Thanks a lot,” he said sarcastically. “Now I’ll have that stuck in my head all day.” Just what he needed, on top of Snoke’s attacks, Rey’s jibes, and the phantom child. Spikey laughed and charged onto another topic before he could dwell on it too much. One of her virtues.

“The terrible tunes always stick. Not like this thing I’m trying to learn!”

Kylo imagined he could see the hypercomm screen flexing with the assault of notes she unleashed next. High, low, and everything in between.

“What was _that?”_

“Ah, it’s this thing I’m in. My singing teacher thought I should try out for it and they gave me a role.”

“Like an opera or something?” said Kylo, sneering incredulously. “I thought you were singing in clubs or something.”

“Well yeah, I do that for money. But okay, this _is_ opera. It’s great though. Costumes. So much blood. Everyone dies in the end.”

Kylo laughed and shook his head. He had excruciating memories of being exposed to high culture at diplomatic functions with his parents.

“Are there operas where everyone _doesn’t_ die?” he asked.

“Well, some. But they’re generally the Pirate King sort of opera.”

“I’m never going to hear you sing opera, then. _Ever._ Even if you become the most famous singer in the Galaxy.”

He smiled at her, because it was nice to imagine a future in which he could decide not to go to the opera because he hated it, rather than because everyone wanted to kill him. Kylo Ren arriving in some public place would tend to overshadow anything else going on there, he thought.

Morse cleared his throat impatiently in the background. Spikey looked over her shoulder. He must have been signalling her.

“Morse wants to go. He’s meeting some girl.” She rolled her eyes with a ‘Tch’ of her tongue.

“Life outside the First Order seems to suit you, then, Morse?” asked Kylo.

Morse shrugged. He still had an indefinable air of the military about him, but it was less obvious every time Kylo saw him.

“These students talk a load of nonsense, but they work hard, I’ll give them credit for that. And the parties aren’t bad.”

“You and the boys must stick out like a sore thumb,” said Kylo.

“Well, we don’t attend classes with her. And you know what they say, the girls love a soldier.”

“The First Order ones, not so much,” said Spikey. “But even so he’s found someone willing to overlook that. Good luck with your hunt for Rey.”

“Well, good luck with your opera or whatever it is,” said Kylo.

She gave him a serious look, and for the first time she wasn’t putting on an act, being the happy scatterbrain. “Well, if the war doesn’t come. If it does, there’ll be no opera and no school. But what can we do about any of that? So we carry on.”

The war.

“I’m sure my mother is working on that,” he said. “And Rey.”

“I’m sure there are things you should be doing too. More than being a space pirate,” she said severely. “You count, in all of this.”

Furious, he nearly pushed himself through the screen at her. She flinched back at his expression but did not look away.

“Good-bye,” he snarled, and punched off the connection, seething at the injustice. It wasn’t as if she was doing anything remotely useful either.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	14. Space Pirate!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Space fugitives need to eat.
> 
> * * *

Show time, as Spikey might say, and today’s show was _The Pirate King._ Kylo dropped out of hyperspace over Eriadu, where there was a orbital refueling station on the Hydian Way route he’d been following. If there was anything better than having an upsilon-class shuttle fitted with hyperdrive, it was having one that had also been stealthed for the Knights of Ren’s covert operations. Eriadu Station wouldn’t know what had hit it. At least, not until after he’d left.

Nobody would see him unless they actually looked, and at an overworked port like this, people were too busy watching their screens to notice the _Flappy Whatever_ landing on one of the outer pads. Space is boring. People who live there don’t spend time staring at it. They stare longingly at the nearest planet, or paper over the windows next to their workstations with pictures of waterfalls in the cloud forests of Naboo. The screens would not register his arrival. 

The ship touched down gently and lifted its wings up. Kylo pulled a pressure suit over the orange mechanic’s overalls he was wearing and secured the helmet. Most people preferred to use the landing bays which had an atmosphere, but these auxiliary landing spots existed for when things got overcrowded. He climbed out the airlock hatch, bounced over to the fuelling connectors, and dragged a Malastarian fuel hose over to the ship, where he hooked it up. Nothing happened, but that was okay, he had the Force on his side. Then he went to the station entry lock, noting the number of the landing pad as he went in. Fifty-four. He unhitched his helmet and clipped it to his belt once the airlock had cycled. He had his hair tied up in a cloth that also concealed his ears. 

Inside the airlock he followed a long, echoing corridor full of junk and rubbish until he arrived at a concourse. It was hot, steamy and full of noise. People of all species pushed past him as he stood there getting his bearings. Stalls crammed the sides of the concourse selling everything from food to knick-knacks to good luck charms. The smell was incredible. Some of it good, some of it just too alien to be comfortable. It was a bit overwhelming after his weeks in the ship.

Kylo picked up a plate of kebabs from the nearest stall.

“That’ll be ten eriadis,” said the stallholder, a greasy-looking Crolute that reminded Kylo of the Unkar Plutt security footage he’d studied.

“I’ve paid,” said Kylo, using the Force to make it appear so. Free food was child’s play. He used to get in trouble for this kind of thing when he was little. Now he planned use the same trick when he ordered supplies for the ship.

The control tower for the station was at the top, of course: a darkened space full of screens, flashing lights and harried-looking flight controllers. Kylo slid in, unnoticed, and stalked softly to where a pale-looking Rodian was arguing with an incoming ship via commlink. He waited until the Rodian was finished, and then asked him about landing pad 54. The Rodian looked up at him, puzzled to find Kylo standing next to him. Kylo reached into his mind, saw landing pad 54 in there, and gently suggested that the Rodian register it as being taken by a mining ship called the _Steelpecker._

Next stop was the fuel store, where he suggested to somebody that there was a problem with the fuel lines on landing pad 54. A sloppily-dressed Togruta fiddled with his screens for a moment before smiling dazedly up at Kylo. 

“All fixed. It’s filling up right now. How are you paying?”

“It’s paid for. Company card,” said Kylo, finding the space in the Togruta’s mind where he could make it appear so. The Togruta entered the “paid” code into the correct space.

It was the same story again at the ship’s chandlers, a couple of levels lower down. “Oh, add in another carton of protein bars. Have them send it out to 54. I’ll supervise loading it myself,” he said. The Ortolan behind the counter tried to talk him into buying some gourmet pre-cooked plumpbirds in insta-heat trays, but Kylo waved him off. The Ortolan made a dismissive noise about Kylo’s lack of interest in fine space cuisine, and signalled some droids over to help. Too easy. Like taking candy from a baby. 

Kylo smirked a little to himself as he strolled back up to the shopping precinct. He needed a less dramatic wardrobe for everyday wear, he decided. He ran his hands over a rack of shirts in different colours and wondered what he might wear, if he didn’t wear black. Spikey would have had opinions on that, he was sure, but who knew if she even had any taste in clothes? He couldn’t remember what she was wearing now she wasn’t a Palace cleaner any more.

Blue…did anyone wear blue these days? Brown would match his eyes…did people still do that? Drab colour, anyway. Rey would probably like the green shirt with little plant sprigs woven into the the pattern. 

The Aqualish cashier left his station behind the counter to bring Kylo an armload of tunics. “These would go admirably with those shirts,” he suggested. 

“Which ones?”

“All of them,” said the cashier

“I’m not made of money,” snapped Kylo. He’d had unlimited funds once, thanks to the First Order. After leaving he’d given all his loose credits to Spikey just to see her reaction. It had been worth it. 

But of course he didn’t need money.

“Oh well, you talked me into it,” he said, leaning on the Aqualish with the Force. “Pleasure to do business with you. Wrap up the lot.” The cashier did so, and Kylo stuffed them into his satchel and walked off without paying, feeling pretty jaunty and whistling a theme from _The Pirate King._

That feeling vanished abruptly as if somebody had tipped a bucket of cold water down his back. His Force senses were suddenly on full alert. He was being watched. He started making his way back to his landing pad, trying not to hurry too obviously. People were in his way, offering him things or standing around to haggle with traders or simply dawdling. His sense of Force-fuelled urgency grew and he started to wade through the crowd, pushing people aside. The crowd started to thin as he got closer to the landing bay access-ways. Whoever was after him would make their move soon, he was certain, once there was less danger of harming bystanders.

Then the Force rose up in him in the way it did sometimes, dreamlike and unasked, and he found himself diving sideways as a flash of light buzzed over his head. A woman screamed as he rolled to his feet and drew his lightsaber in one smooth motion. Another bolt of light, and he deflected it easily. Now he could see who was firing. A human in drab spacewear, up on a stairway above him. Some kind of bounty hunter, probably. That was incredibly bad luck. The man leaned into his wrist, no doubt calling for back-up. Kylo took advantage of the man’s momentary distraction to make a Force-leap up to an air conduit above the concourse. With the next jump he landed in front of his attacker, who started to fire desperately, unable to believe he was missing at point-blank range. 

Well, that’s the Force for you, thought Kylo, barely aware of how he was using the lightsaber to protect himself. The repaired kyber-crystal made a new colour, golden red, and Kylo was almost mesmerised by the beauty of it, the fan of light it made as he struck and struck, the Force flowing effortlessly through him.

Then the man was dead in front of him, charred slashes smoking on his body. Kylo turned and leapt lightly down to the concourse which had miraculously cleared of people. Not entirely though. As he accelerated into a dead run he vaguely noticed dead bodies in his path, marked with blaster fire. His assailant’s wild shots had found targets after all. A Twilek woman lay with fruit spilling from a shopping basket. A child sat, frozen in the act of reaching out to her. Only her eyes moved as Kylo ran past.

A klaxon started up and there were distant shouts, amplified, ordering him to stop. Kylo ran even faster, twirling his lightsaber behind him almost absent-mindedly to block following shots. With the Force this strong in him, it seemed impossible that anyone could shoot him, and he was right.

As he neared the turn-off towards his ship, a whole detachment of security personnel appeared ahead of him, firing enthusiastically. He hurled a Force-push in their direction and in the resulting pile-up many of them ended up shooting each other. It was a miracle they hadn’t done that to themselves already, he thought, as he made the turn down the deserted corridor to his ship. 

He clipped on the helmet as he ran, and used the Force to open the airlock in front of him - both doors. The rush of escaping air pushed him even faster. Another klaxon and a flashing light started up, signalling the sudden loss of pressure. The yells of his pursuers grew thin and high-pitched before an emergency pressure door slammed down behind hm somewhere, stopping the blaster bolts aimed at his back.

Kylo bounded out onto the launch pad. The ship was still filling up. He slashed at the fuel hose, and it started lashing around spewing glowing green fuel everywhere. A couple of droids bringing supply cartons backed away hurriedly, spinning in confused circles. Fuel began to spurt out of the ship’s tanks as well, until he felt around with the Force for a cut-off valve. Fiddly work to do when he needed to run! Somewhere the station’s defences were turning, readying to fire. 

A few cartons were already stacked in the space next to the shuttle’s ramp, which was already lowering to Kylo’s commands. He used the Force to hurl the nearest cartons in front of him as he ran into the ship. That was it, all he could manage. A minute later he was in the pilot’s chair and the ship’s engines were warming up to a juddering roar. As soon as it left the ground, he spun it through 180 degrees and shot off in the opposite direction to his starting position. Laser cannon blasts seared the space around him, but his lightning-fast change of direction had left them scrambling to get a bead on him. The _Flappy Dactillion_ stretched its wings out and Kylo sent it jinking and darting around the shots aimed at him. This was what he was born to do, he was sure: a skill he’d inherited from his grandfather. It felt effortless. 

The ship was ready for lightspeed, and he pulled the drive lever down with a grunt of satisfaction. Only then did he realise that he still had the shirts and tunics he’d bought slung in the bag over his shoulder. Behind him, three cartons lay on the floor where they’d dropped. He inspected them. All protein bars. 

So that was the success of his piracy. Three shirts, two tunics, three cartons of protein bars and a ship half-fuelled. He wasn’t going to make the annals of piracy at this rate. Still, it hadn’t exactly been difficult. It had felt tremendous, the way the Force picked him up and carried him through the action with such unstoppable power.

But the child…

As the ship settled down to its routine lightspeed noises, he could hear another sound. A heartbroken wailing. Like a child that had lost its mother.

He sat absolutely still for as long as he could stand it. The sound must stop. It wasn’t real. There was no child on the ship with him. No-one had sneaked on board while he was at the station.

Maybe it was a trick of the engines. Some bearing gone slightly out of kilter. He listened. The sound continued. It could be a mechanical noise. But so life-like!

Kylo jumped out of his chair and glided out of the cockpit and down the ship’s central corridor. Now the sound seemed to be behind him. He whirled around. The sound stopped with a choked whimper, suddenly eerily close. He banged on the durasteel wall next to him. Nothing answered but a metallic echo.

Morosely he walked back to the food cartons and stowed them away. He opened one and took out a protein bar. Maybe these ones tasted different.

They didn’t.

He put off going to bed for as long as possible. But there wasn’t much to do on the empty ship, once he’d showered off the horrible amount of sweat he’d collected from running in the pressure suit. He reached out tentatively to Rey, but changed his mind almost immediately. He hadn’t killed the Twilek. But he could imagine how that concourse and its dead bodies would look to Rey.

Eventually he had to go to bed, where he lay for long hours, seeing over and over again the little Twilek girl, frozen in fear as he leapt over her dead mother’s body. Her eyes followed him into his dreams.


	15. Bad Dreams on the way to D'Qar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey's journey back to D'Qar. Now it's her turn to have bad dreams.
> 
> * * *

The ride back to D’Qar was long, and I found myself falling into the habit of seeking out Kylo before I fell asleep. I knew he was going crazy on that ship. I told myself I was just scanning my environment for danger. A crazy Kylo — or crazier than before — was a danger, running wild around the Galaxy as he was. He told me he was a space pirate, at one point. Though he seemed uncomfortable about it. There was something he wasn’t telling me. I wondered what it would take to make him ashamed.

Crazy or not, I grew more comfortable with him. I remembered how I’d linked once to find him talking with Spikey, him on his bed, ready to sleep, and the trust growing between them. It must have felt a bit like this. It helped that we were a safe distance from each other. I don’t know how Spikey stood it, knowing he could have wrapped one hand right round her neck and throttled her if she said the wrong thing.

I should have left him alone. For as long as I kept contacting him along the link, he could put off doing what he knew he needed to do. But he wasn’t ready to face Leia, so I tried to keep him talking instead.

 _When are you going to show up to drag me off to D’Qar?_ he said, trying not to appear too hopeful. I knew he thought a lot about how we were due a re-match. Blade against blade. See who’d learned the most in our time apart.

_Kylo, I’m not chasing round the Galaxy looking for you. I want to find my family. You need to make up your mind what it is you want to do._

He seemed to feel insulted.

_I bet the Resistance won’t be happy with that. Aren’t you supposed to be their great Jedi hope now? An inspiration to the troops and all that?_

_Well, yes,_ I thought. _But finding my family comes first. That was always the deal._

_Do they mean that much to you?_

_Yes! Can’t you see how…? This is the trouble with you! You can’t imagine somebody else’s point of view for one moment. You hate your family, so you won’t even think what it’s like for me to lose mine the way I did!_

It really irritated me, because he _knew_ how lonely I’d been! He’d _felt_ it! But he had this romantic notion that he’d have reacted differently if he’d been dumped on Jakku as a child. Free of his family, free of Snoke — all he could see was freedom.

Still, this time I could feel him making an effort. He asked me about my parents, and I told him what I knew. I even showed him the little portrait I had of them on the holodisc Artoo had given me.

As soon as I did that I knew I’d made a mistake. All my Force instincts were blaring at me to stop, stop! Kylo was confused.

_I wasn’t going to….I’ve got nothing against them. Stop suspecting me of…_

I could feel him winding up into one of his rages. But I could also feel something cold along the link, something corrupt.

 _It’s not me,_ said Kylo.

_Are you sure you’re free of Snoke?_

He answered me with a burst of fury, not directed at me. I went to sleep feeling very uneasy, and it was no surprise that my dreams that night were horrible. I walked endlessly, and my hair came unbound and stuck to something behind me that I couldn’t see, but had to drag behind me.

*   *   *

Rain lashing down on a dull plain. Nothing but slick mud churned up into rows, clods melting to shapelessness. The rain so hard that everything is smudged into a grey mist. I hear shouts behind me.

There is something in the murk. A huge machine. Something I don’t recognise, but I can see that it has foundered on its tracks in the thick mud. There are small human figures swarming around it, digging and pulling. It seems impossible that they could ever move this thing.

My point of view changes. I am closer. I can see now that the machine is half tipped into a crater. There are things poking up through the mud on the perimeter of the crater. A leg, an arm. A work crew trudges into view from behind the machine, dragging long beams. It looks like they’re going to build something to support the track that is hanging in the air. Meanwhile, the rest of them are digging out the opposite track that is buried in the mud.

Closer still, and now I too can feel the rain battering my face, running icy fingers down my back. It is numbingly cold. The people are struggling and slipping in the mud, they are mud-coloured people. Only their eyes and mouths show.

The dim light picks out the only figures that are not covered in mud. Stormtroopers, shining white. The muzzles of their blasters never far from the slowest workers.

Closer still. A person slips and does not get up. A stormtrooper walks over slowly. The nearest people are hissing “get up, get up!” to the fallen figure, but it does not move. One bends down to help it up, but now the stormtrooper is close, and strikes the helper aside with the barrel of his blaster. Everyone else continues digging, but I can see by the set of their shoulders that they are watching, sidelong, pretending not to.

The stormtrooper waits for an endless moment, and then fires his blaster, one shot through the back of the neck. The prone figure jerks and is still. The stormtrooper gestures for the two nearest workers to move the body out of the way.

A short, stocky woman takes the body by the feet, but then turns to the stormtrooper.

“We don’t need to do this. The plough has repulsorlifts. I could fix them. I’m a mechanic!”

“No.” The stormtrooper brings the barrel of his blaster up.

“Please. Just let me try!”

The stormtrooper lunges at her with his blaster up so that the woman slips and falls backwards. The stormtrooper turns away, laughing.

I’m right there, and before the woman pushes herself to her feet, I see her face. It is my mother. As she bends down to pick up the feet of the dead worker, I fly to her, but the rain has turned into a suffocating glove, trapping me and filling my lungs.

* * *

I woke up, gasping for air. I must have made some noise, for Chewie was there, lifting me effortlessly out of my bunk. I clung to his warmth, still shaking from the cold of the dream. He crooned softly and carried me into the cockpit.

Luke was there, sprawled sleeplessly in the pilot’s chair with a cup of kaffa and staring at hyperspace. There was no reason to be there except his own nerves about seeing Leia again.

“I had the most awful dream. My mother was in it. She was labouring in some terrible place. All these people were trying to dig a machine out of the mud, and stormtroopers were shooting anyone that couldn’t work!”

“It was just a dream, Rey.”

Chewie came in with a cup of kaffa for me. Too sweet, but just what I needed.

“I don’t think it was a dream. It felt like a Force-vision. Like the fight in the snow, that came true on Starkiller Base. I think this is _happening_ somewhere.”

Luke gave me a worried look. He didn’t have any words of comfort. He’d been through this before.

“Just… don’t make any rash decisions, okay? Tell me what you’re going to do before you do it. Don’t rush off like I did. We’re arriving in D’Qar in a couple of hours. If the Force shows you where this is happening, we could probably get help to mount a rescue mission. It sounds like a First Order situation Leia would want to know about even if your mother wasn’t involved.”

I curled up in the copilot chair, drinking kaffa and eating Wookiee snacks, just as Luke and Han used to, years ago.

* * *  
Arriving in D’Qar was awkward. People there knew the Millennium Falcon and took note of its arrival. The fact that Leia and C3PO were waiting to welcome it drew attention as well. As the hatch came down, Luke and I saw quite a crowd waiting below. Luke sighed and shot me a quick look. He seemed to know that I didn’t like the thought of so many people staring at me.

“I’ll go first and draw their fire,” he joked, and walked down the ramp with more confidence than he felt, I think. Leia stood stock still, drinking in the sight of him. _Finally, one who came back,_ she thought, the words coming easily into my mind. She opened her arms and he walked into them.

I followed with Artoo, who bumbled over to Leia’s protocol droid C3PO. The golden droid seemed overcome, and kept repeating “Master Luke! I had given up hope!” over and over, waving his hands in a stiff imitation of human amazement.

“And I hadn’t!” snapped Leia over Luke’s shoulder, to shut him up. Artoo dragged C3PO off somewhere to fill him in on the latest.

The buzz of the crowd grew much louder as soon as C3PO said Luke’s name. They probably knew I was sent to bring Luke back, and here was a wise old man in a Jedi robe, so presumably this was him….but what did it all mean? A few people started to clap hesitantly and the rest joined in.

Leia stepped back from Luke finally and made a formal welcoming gesture between him and the crowd.

“My brother, Luke. Thank you for welcoming him to D’Qar. Give us some time alone, please.” She caught sight of me, but I shook my head quickly to her unspoken question. I knew they needed to talk to each other first.

I didn’t know anybody else. A few people remembered that I’d gone off to find Luke all those months ago, and they came up to congratulate me for bringing him back. I wondered what to do next.

Just then Chewie came down the ramp. He’d been giving the Falcon a final check. He saw me standing there at a loss and roared for me to follow him. He’d show me where I could get rooms assigned to me. After that, if he couldn’t find Finn or his friend Poe for me, then I was welcome to join him. He was planning to barbecue a big, bloody chunk of meat and drink some terrible liquor, and he’d appreciate company. I followed after him gratefully.

The wookiees and large carnivores on the base liked to eat and socialise in a sheltered area that was set up for them next to the mess hall. The seating was uncomfortably big for me, but I’ve always liked being around different kinds of people, listening to new languages and seeing new cultures. Luke told me the Force helped me pick up languages as quickly as I do. Growing up on Jakku, most people spoke several languages and I didn’t know it was unusual to learn so many so fast. I must have been mind-reading without realising it.

There were a couple of other wookiees there and some even bigger guys with tusks. Chewie introduced me as a pilot of the Millennium Falcon. They waved us over to the big firepit and invited us to share some of their food. Chewie was a little inaccurate, calling the meal a bloody chunk of meat. It was spicy barbecued perfection such as I’d never imagined, let alone eaten. I could feel my body seizing on the protein with joy.

Chewie growled approvingly. It’d really put muscles on me, he said. A week of this and we’d be ready to arm-wrestle, he reckoned.

He was right about the liquor. It was fiery and awful. At first it was all I could do to lick the wet insides of the enormous glass that was handed to me. Everyone laughed. One of the tusk guys snuffled something, apparently saying that in drinking, as with anything, practice made perfect.

“Hey, I understood him!” I said.

“Keep drinking and it’ll be easy. Wookiee liquor is the universal translator,” Chewie said.

“Finish that glass and you’ll be den-sisters with everyone,” said one of the others. All the wookiees struck up a sentimental song about long-lost brothers and sisters meeting again, and how strong their love still was for each other. Their howling chorus made the air throb. I was having the best time, trying to sing along with my tiny human voice.

It grew dark, and I ventured to take actual sips of my drink as I listened to them talk about their recent missions. They didn’t press me for details about who I was or where I’d been. I felt welcome in their firelit circle.

And then my wonderful evening got better. A human figure vaulted over the back of the long seating in front of me and into the firelight. It was Finn!

“I heard you were back!” He swept me up in a hug. I hugged him back.

“They’re teaching you to drink like a pilot, I see,” he said, laughing. I handed him my drink. His friend Poe appeared, still dressed in his flight suit.

“Yeah, you won’t fly straight with all that in you.” He took it off Finn and knocked back a swallow. We all sat down leaning up against Chewie, who growled a complaint about being treated like furniture by the frikken' short-lifers. Poe grinned at him. They had become good friends, and I learned that Chewie often crewed for Poe on missions. Chewie was in charge of any ships in Hangar Seven while they were on the ground. “Keeps them running sweet,” said Poe. Chewie gave back a toothy grin for the compliment.

These are my new family, I thought, as the evening went on and, with the aid of alcohol, we set the world to rights, from the small problems of Finn’s and Poe’s squads to the large ones of the war. Chewie’s warm arm on one side of me, and Finn’s shoulder on the other.

They walked me to my room in the barracks, all of us swaying slightly.

“This is yours,” said Poe, squinting at the key I’d been given earlier. “So, Finn, are you going to kiss your favourite girl goodnight?” said Poe. Finn gave him a hurt look and Chewie swiped at his head with one paw.

“He thinks I need his help,” said Finn to me, seriously. Poe whooped with laughter, dancing away from Chewie’s mock-attack. Meanwhile I just stood there not knowing what to do. Finn saw my embarrassment.

“It won’t be when you’re around, you jerk!” he told Poe. Poe jumped up at Chewie and gave him a smooch on the lips.

“See, easy. Nothing to it.” Chewie roared and swatted at him some more. Poe reeled back and made a big fuss out of spitting bits of hair off his lips.

“I think I’m not in a kissy mood,” I said in a tiny voice to Finn. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“Uh, yeah!” said Finn. “We’ve got each other’s backs, always!”

But I saw something change in his eyes. He hesitated, then swept me into a hug. Finn’s hugs are good too, and always bring back the feelings I had when we first hugged, when we were both so glad to be alive and amazed to have survived our adventures. So why did I stiffen for a second?

The boys left, still whacking each other on the head. I went into the plain little room assigned to me, undressed and slipped into bed without wasting time. Sleep took a while to come, though.

When _had_ I felt “kissy”, as I’d put it? There had been a boy once on Jakku, I remembered. We’d made friends working alongside each other fixing up landspeeders. We shared parts we’d scavenged, and we’d go on long rides together, testing out our engines. Or in his case, getting away from his family. I don’t know why he wanted to. They were lovely people, and often invited me to join their meals. It was a teenage thing, I guess, him wanting to be independent. We got caught in a sandstorm once, and shared our food and water together for three days while sheltering in a wreck. We cuddled up for warmth at night, and we tried out kissing. It was too cold to take our clothes off, and we were so shy we were glad of the darkness in the ships’ hold where we lay together, cautiously running our hands over each other.

Immediately after that he started talking about how we’d marry and fix up our own ship to fly around the galaxy with. I wasn’t interested. His family moved off-planet soon after that.

It was an interesting experiment, and I would have been keen to try more. It had felt nothing like the easy warmth I felt with Finn. And neither was it like the hot, tingling feeling that came over me sometimes and turned my insides to water. I wanted to feel that excitement for Finn or Poe or anyone that was brave and happy and in love with life. But lately that feeling seemed tied to thoughts of Kylo, or to him thinking about me. I felt like he was poisoning me with it, turning those feelings in his direction when they should have gone somewhere better.

Even worse, it was something I couldn’t talk to Finn about. I had already found myself avoiding the topic of Kylo. I felt uncomfortable telling him about the times Kylo and I _didn’t_ argue across our link, like the time we fixed his ship together. I was telling Finn less and less truth, and I hated that. I told myself Finn didn’t need to know how eager Kylo was to talk to me. 

Lying to Finn hurt, and I felt ashamed of myself. I made up my mind to think less about Kylo.

When I fell asleep at last another dream or vision came on me. This time it was my father. He was seated in a dark cell. He was still splattered with mud from the awful dark plain of my other dream where the people slaved at blaster-point. He was afraid. Somebody was going to question him again. From the way he held his hand, I realised it was broken. They thought he was hiding something, some information. My mother was trying to do something to escape, and he had to conceal the knowledge. He wasn’t sure he could hold out.

I could feel his terror at the sound of approaching footsteps outside his cell. His breath was coming short, catching in his throat. I knew somehow what had been done to him already.

“I’m going to find you! We’re coming to get you!” I cried out, as loud as I could, and woke myself up. He hadn’t heard me. What _use_ was the Force, after all?

 

 

 


	16. Rey Flies for the Resistance. To War! To War!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally Rey gets the chance to confront the First Order and chase down her dreams. She's like a Valkyrie in an X-wing! But Leia's heart aches for her.
> 
> * * *

 

The next morning I was called into a meeting with Luke and Leia. I did a double-take when I saw Luke. He’d shaved his beard off. Both of them looked as though years had dropped away. Leia welcomed me with a big smile and pulled me into a hug. “I owe you an apology. I’m sorry I didn’t do this yesterday.”

 

I said Finn and Chewie had looked after me, and didn't mention my hangover.

 

“Finn’s coming too,” Leia said. I must have looked surprised, because she added, “He’s invaluable to us, and not just because of the work he’s doing building up our infantry corps. We can make maps of the Galaxy and plot out what we know, but Finn often sees the links in ways we don’t, and his predictions of the First Order’s actions have proved very reliable.”

 

“They’re fairly predicable,” said Finn, coming in with a grin just then. “Hux is still in charge.”

 

Everyone sat down and we got down to business. Business turned out to be me and Kylo.

 

“Rey, can you find him? I feel the key is to bring him back to our side.”

 

“I don’t think so,” I said. Leia sensed I wasn’t being wholly honest. That was the Force, in her. _She_ wouldn’t have spent twenty years being fooled by Palpatine, if she’d been in the Senate all those years ago. She didn’t have to say anything, but I felt her Force lean up against mine.

 

“All right, maybe I could. But he’s not ready yet,” I said. “He’s got to make up his mind who he is.” 

 

Leia’s eyes kindled to anger. “He’s my son! There’s nothing to be confused about there!”

 

“He has to find out who he is for himself!” I said. I surprised myself by being angry on Kylo’s behalf. “He’s had a lifetime of being told he’s this, that and the other thing! Most lately by Snoke. None of it has fit him particularly well! The last thing he needs is me or anybody else telling him what to think!”

 

“But he’s so _wrong_ about everything!” said Leia.

 

“And you think he’s going to listen to me? I know almost nothing about politics or history. He’s been a _leader_ in his world, giving orders, I don’t know, maybe even shaping their policies. Real power. He’s not going to listen to a girl from Jakku that can fix spaceships a bit, and has read some _books._ No matter how much Force I have!

 

Leia glared at me for a moment after I finished speaking, then threw up her hands in defeat. “All right then, what _do_ you want to do?”

 

Somehow this had undermined my case for what I wanted to do instead. But I had to try anyway. I told her about my dreams: my parents and the danger they were in. It sounded unbelievably selfish, when there were so many other people at risk right then. 

 

“I can’t believe the Force would send me these dreams if it wasn’t important,” I finished lamely, hoping it was true.

 

Leia glanced over at Luke, who nodded, much to my surprise. Leia shrugged. 

 

“Clearly you’re not going to be able to concentrate on anything else until they’re found. And I appreciate that you’ve already given much more time to Luke and the Jedi Temple than you originally intended…”

 

Finn cut in. “These dreams sound like they’re happening somewhere in one of the worlds the First Order has turned into farm gulags. If we’re still planning to send more missions to liberate them, then it makes sense for Rey to come along.” He turned to me. “Could you use the Force to find them, if you were closer?”

 

“I think the Force might guide me,” I said, feeling ignorant as usual. In some stories, the Force guided people who were looking for things. In others, it did not. The Jedi Temple’s archive had an apparently unlimited store of discussions about why that might be so. Scholars suggested that proximity helped, sometimes. Usually. Not always.

 

Leia turned to Luke. “Do you agree? Will you go with her?”

 

“I think we should act separately. Rey’s ready to go on a mission like this one alone. And we shouldn’t be together in one place too often from now on. It’d make Snoke’s life far too easy if he could capture both of us at once.”

 

Leia pursed her lips at the unwelcome thought and nodded. “All right. Then that’s what we’ll do. Rey, can you check in with the medbay next? We’re giving our pilots tracking devices in case they’re downed and can’t contact their mother ship.’

 

I nodded. Leia turned to Finn.

 

“How soon can you take your squads out, Finn?”

 

“Tomorrow,” he said. “C and D squads are ready for it.”

 

I didn’t realise I’d been holding my breath. I let it out in a big sigh of relief. Finally, finally! And in the search for my parents, I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather have by my side than Finn.

 

  *     *      *      *



** Leia **

 

*         *          *

Leia kept Finn behind after the others had left the meeting. He stood at ease in front of Leia’s tactical map of the Galaxy. Even though the meeting was over, she could see he was still thinking about the various movements and dispositions they’d discussed.

 

“How are you getting on, Finn?” 

 

“Busy, but I like it.” 

 

He was indeed busy. He alternated between starting new recruits in their training and leading seasoned troops on missions. He also took part in tactical meetings such as the one they’d had today. It was remarkable how quickly he’d grown into the responsibilities he was given, Leia thought.

 

“You would have made a formidable Jedi,” Leia said.

 

“Except I don’t have the Force,” said Finn.

 

“I know. But you have something Luke had, a sort of easiness with whoever you’re with and whatever you’re doing. Whatever the situation demands, you find something inside yourself to respond with.”

 

“Yeah, well whatever happens, I just go with it.” Finn smiled. “A few months ago I told the biggest lie of my life. When I first met Rey I told her I was with the Resistance, because I needed her help. And now I’m actually with the Resistance! Every day is like the biggest blessing I could imagine.”

 

“Are you religious, Finn?”

 

Finn made a grimace as though she’d shocked or even disgusted him. “No, that was really discouraged. Us stormtroopers couldn’t have a religion higher than serving the First Order.”

 

And yet he had an air of faith, Leia thought. It was one reason he was so valuable as a trainer for the new recruits. Somehow he managed to instil in them a belief that they were part of something larger than themselves. Serving a higher purpose.

 

“You don’t have war as your religion instead, though, do you?”

 

“No, M’am. I fight so we don’t have to any more.”

 

 “That doesn’t surprise me. You enjoy life too much to idolise fighting. Like Poe. Your troops love you, you know.”

 

“I guess all my training was about making us the most efficient cogs in the most powerful machine, but there was something that always felt wrong about it. Like it was forced on us. Now I’m with the Resistance, I can see ways that we can make that sort of team spirit without crushing everyone in the process.”

 

“Well, whatever you’re doing, keep doing it,” said Leia. “Now, I need to talk to you about Rey.”

 

Finn’s face became serious at once. “What about Rey?”

 

“Luke feels she’s a target. Snoke is looking for her. He may have some way to feed off her power. She is very powerful, you know.”

 

Finn nodded. “She knows he’s searching for her. And Ky— Ben too.” He frowned, and Leia could tell he was more perturbed by the enemy he’d met than by Snoke.

 

“Rey can probably handle Ben.”

 

Finn’s face showed that he didn’t agree, but Leia didn’t press it.

 

“Finn, we can’t keep her here. She’s too valuable as a weapon against the First Order. But at the same time, I’m terrified of losing her. I’m going to tell you something in confidence, because I’m afraid you may need to know. We’re putting a tracker on her, so if she’s taken, we can find her. It may be the lead to Snoke that we’ve been waiting for.”

 

Some of the light went out of Finn’s eyes. “So you’re going to use her as…bait?” 

 

Leia winced. “No! Just that…if anything happened to her, we’d want to find her!”

 

“The First Order knows to check for that kind of thing. If they capture her, they’ll cut the transponder out of her.”

 

“Ah, but there will be a second one, and _that_ one, neither she nor they will know about. It’s being fitted to her at the same time they insert the standard tracker. It’s…a biological insert. She won’t know it’s there, so she can’t betray its existence under any sort of questioning.”

 

“They’ll find it anyway, won’t they?” asked Finn.

 

“No. This is new technology. It’s something that her cells will create, running on her own cellular clock. Once every twelve hours, the transponder assembles itself within her body and sends a signal. The rest of the time, it doesn’t exist.”

 

Leia took something from a drawer. It was a flat circular disc that would fit on the palm of his hand. She tabbed a button on the side, and the numbers 00:00:00 appeared in glowing script.

 

“Her coordinates will show up once it’s installed. I have one, and so does Luke. Can I trust you to say nothing about this to Rey?”

 

“Of course,” said Finn, looking unhappy. 

 

She offered him the disc, and Finn took it. 

 

“She’ll be in the medbay overnight. You might want to see her in the morning.” Leia smiled at him, a rather small smile. “I know you’re fond of her.”

 

He nodded and slipped the disc into a pocket, looking troubled. 

 

“If you don’t need me for anything else?” he asked. 

 

 

Leia shook her head and dismissed him. He left, looking troubled. She sighed. He hadn’t been too far off the mark. If the worst came to the worst, Rey might be little more than bait, and Leia’s heart ached for the girl. 

 

  *   *    *



Rey

 

*    *  *

 

I was born to do this, I thought, as I swooped across the skies of Mezzala, the planet we were liberating from the First Order. My X-wing’s engines sent an electrifying buzz of power running through my body from my seat to the top of my spine. The joystick in my hands responded with a liquid smoothness. Poe had barely had to teach me anything. I had the gift, and I was where I was meant to be.

 

My senses were alive with the Force, so that the lines of blaster and laser fire seemed no more than decorative, for all the harm they would do me. It was like a song I knew well, so well that nothing could take me by surprise. Everything seemed to happen incredibly fast, yet also, everything seemed slowed down so I had all the time in the world to react.

 

Handfuls of TIE-fighters scattered across the sky like flower petals, so slow they seemed. Each in turn bloomed into flame. Burning flowers at the end of my cannons.

 

In the intensity of the passing moments, I forgot all about my parents, even though the urgency of my search had tormented me, asleep and awake, throughout the journey to Mezzala.

 

Mezzala’s big continents passed under my wings, broad and flat and traced with regular mountain ranges that kept the weather stable. Perfect farming territories. The enormous farmlands stretched below me, featureless green and brown and grey. The lights of small towns lit up the dark side of the planet, sparsely scattered. 

 

I’d dropped out of a Resistance cruiser shortly before, part of Poe’s squad tasked with keeping the skies clear of First Order ships while our ground crews attacked the military bases that had turned this dull farm planet into a hellish labour camp. With the defence they were mounting on these planets we believed the First Order must be desperate for food. Their hidden strongholds in the Outer Rim were presumably not very liveable planets.

 

“Black leader here. That’s dealt with the TIEs. Let’s take on their cruisers.” Poe’s voice on the comms.

 

I’d spotted something on my screens though. Transponders on the ground, starting to move. I knew, through the Force, what they were. 

 

“They’re trying to move out their grain freighters. Can I try to take them down before they lift?”

 

“Go ahead, Red Nine.” 

 

I liked my code name. Red Nine. It sounded serious. Poe trusted my judgement in a fight. I think Leia or Luke had taken him aside and given him an idea of what a pilot with the Force could do.

 

I shoved the joystick and let my ship drop over a couple of mountain ranges and then down to another prairie. Knowing already where to look, I dialled up the magnification on my viewscreen. I could see grain silos, fuel tanks, loading machinery and a scatter of buildings on the outskirts of a small town sitting at the junction of some roads. Also the huge grey shapes of First Order freighters, beginning to stir away from their landing pads. 

 

“Not so fast!” I breathed, and whipped the X-wing into a tight spiral that brought me amongst the freighters in seconds. I fired at their power couplings and drive chambers as briskly as I’d gut a fish.  Blowing them up would be easy. Disabling them so we didn’t lose the cargo was an art. I managed five of them successfully; the sixth blew up. I could make out tiny figures running everywhere on the ground. I took the X-wing up before finding out what happened to them.

 

“Red Nine. Since you’re close to the ground, can you go eastwards about 350 klicks? There’s a labour camp, and Finn’s squad are having a bit of trouble there. Can you take out some tanks?”

 

“Roger-roger!” I said. I turned east, towards the advancing night. Over another low range of hills.

 

As soon as I saw the grey ploughed plains on the other side, my Force senses exploded with warnings. _This was the place!_

 

And there it was, a graveyard of wrecked ploughs and harvesters, then a featureless town beyond it. Low, blocky buildings with wide empty streets growing dark in the gathering dusk. Flashes of blaster fire lit up the broad ways, illuminating small figures running for cover. 

 

My viewscreen identified our forces and I emptied my cannons on everything else, the First Order tanks and the white figures of the stormtroopers, until nothing moved. I was barely aware of doing it, because my Force senses were scanning, scanning. 

 

There were a lot of security fences around the farm machinery compound, but one area was particularly well fenced. A row of windowless buildings. _Here!_

 

“D squad? Finn, is that you? I’m overhead. Red Nine, I mean.”

 

“I thought that was you. Amazing flying. Poe’s got competition.”

 

“It’s the Force. Finn, I can feel my parents. This was the place in my dream.” 

 

“Is it? I wondered…as soon as we landed I thought it sounded like the place. Yeah, I can let my squad carry on without me. You’ve broken the back of the opposition, and now the locals are coming out to help. We’ll just be mopping up from now on, I hope.”

 

“Can you meet me by that prison compound to the west of the town? Where all that wrecked machinery is?”

 

“Yep. I’ve got a landspeeder here. I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”

 

I set my X-wing down. After a quick scan for danger, I jumped down and looked around. I had my lightsaber drawn. There was danger, I just couldn’t see it in these featureless barracks. I cut my way through the razor-wire fencing and started towards a larger building, like a hangar or workshop. As soon as I did, a picture forced its way into my head. Rows of prisoners, sitting, bound. My mother and father among them. Pairs of stormtroopers patrolling. The price of making any noise would be death.

 

The Force lent wings to my heels, and I ran like an avenging spirit. I reached the back of the building. It was poorly built but solid. Some kind of local brick. I circled round to the front. There were big hangar doors, shut. 

 

I had no plan. I could rush in and draw their fire, attack them so they had no choice but to fire at me rather than the prisoners. But even with the Force, coming in through the front door would be suicide. I did what Jedi always do, and leapt onto the roof. 

 

Where was Finn? There wasn’t a soul in sight. It was getting dark.

 

A broken tractor was parked in front of the hangar, listing sadly on broken repulsorlifts. I felt around its control panel with the Force. Ignition! The engine started with a roar and I used the Force to drag it towards the hangar doors, gouging the ground as it came. It hit the doors with a wallop. I did it again. 

 

No noise from inside. But I could feel people in there. My parents. 

 

There was the buzz of a landspeeder growing closer. Finn was nearly here. I couldn’t wait, though.

 

I sent the tractor smashing against the doors one more time, and made a smooth circular cut in the metal roof at the same time, hoping nobody would look up while the tractor was making such a tremendous racket. Jumping on the circle I’d made, I rode it as it dropped to the floor of the building.

 

There was nobody there. No rows of bound prisoners slumped against the walls in the darkness. No stormtroopers. But the sense of my parents was still there. Peering through the gloom, I could make out a doorway. Stairs led down. I took them two at a time, lightsaber held before me like a torch.

 

I burst through the door at the bottom. An empty, dark room.

 

Then suddenly six shadows detached themselves from the wall. I caught a glimpse of bizarre helmets, black armour, black robes, like creatures from a nightmare. Then they drew their red lightsabers and I knew them: the Knights of Ren.

 

“So good of you to come to us,” said a silky voice, and I was hit with blasts of the Force from all sides. I fought with everything I had and the room lit up with the power of our battle. I barely felt the sting of the tranquilliser dart as it sank into my neck. 

 

“It certainly saves us running around looking for _you!”_ said the voice, coldly amused. That was the last thing I knew.

 

 

 


	17. Give Up, Kylo!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snoke is that little voice in your head that tells you you can never amount to anything. 
> 
> * * *

He started up out of dreams knowing immediately that something was wrong. Rey, sliding down into that terrible crack that sometimes opened in his dreamworlds. He shook his head, uncertain he was truly awake. The dull ceiling of his bunk was above him, his pillow under his head, growing greasy with use. The real world. But beneath it, the whirling dream, full of loss.

And now, cold laughter in his head. He knew it was Snoke at once, and started to block him out before he could claim the fuzzy territory between sleep and waking.

_Oh, not so fast. You know already what you’ve done, don’t you?_ came Snoke’s thoughts, full of gleeful malice.

_I haven’t done anything. I’ve been asleep. I know those were always your dreams, sent to frighten me. I’m not a child any more_ , he thought, feeling his pulse pounding as dull fury grew in him. All those wasted years, fearing Snoke’s sendings while doing his bidding.

_But I don’t need you any more. I have Rey. And it was all your doing._

_You’re lying again!_ he shouted aloud. But under his anger a terrible unease was growing. It felt like when he woke from that terrible day on Starkiller Base, when he lay half-conscious, knowing he’d done something unforgivable that he couldn’t remember.

_No, I’m not. I have Rey, and I couldn’t have done it without the Force-bond you made. I suppose I should thank you._

Kylo knew Snoke wanted him to beg to for information. Instead he waited, refusing to give Snoke that satisfaction.

Snoke couldn’t resist telling him anyway.

_We had a little problem, didn’t we? She was so good at hiding. But luckily, once she left her hidden planet, I could watch her when she visited your mind. And I learned she was so lonely, so desperate to find her family…._

Kylo remembered the holo of her parents that she’d shown him through the Force-link, and her sudden terror that she’d made a mistake by showing him.

_Yes, once I knew what they looked like, it was so easy,_ continued Snoke smugly. _And so you betrayed her._

_I would never betray her_ , he thought furiously.

_You told me what dreams to give her, Snoke said._

Kylo shot out of bed, desperate for violence. But what could he do against this vile voice in his head?

_You're nothing more than a parasite, you know?_ he snarled. _Like a disgusting tapeworm of the mind._

_Yes. I told her where to find her parents,_ replied Snoke, unperturbed by his insults. _She was surprised to find your old friends the Knights of Ren waiting for her instead._

Kylo felt sick. He should have made it his mission to destroy them. He kicked the nearest wall.

Snoke went on, relentless. _Once I thought YOU would enjoy dragging her around in chains. But I will let them have that pleasure instead. The new recruits I’ve found are especially hungry for some reward for all the training I’ve put them through._

_She’ll tear them limb from limb,_ he thought, gritting his teeth. He wished he could do it himself.

_She won’t even wake up until she’s safely in my keeping,_ thought Snoke.

Kylo had the feeling that Snoke was waiting for him to lose control. The old Kylo would have felt tears of shame and rage pricking his eyes, and would have lashed out. He would have destroyed things, hurt himself and shouted his pain to the world.

He refused to do it. Instead he sat down, feet planted squarely on the floor, motionless, staring straight ahead at the blank cabin walls. The need to scream clenched in his chest. He would not give in.

He was a new man, a man who didn’t scream.

_Of course if you want to see her unharmed, you have only to say so. I can command the Knights to leave her to you, if you come to me._

Even now there was a part of Kylo that seized on Snoke’s words with relief, believing he could be forgiven, that he could be welcomed, that Snoke still wanted him.

What a terrible thing love was. Spikey had said it once, and now he understood too: the heart makes you chain yourself up, ties you to things that will only destroy you, so you go willingly to put your head in the noose.

Snoke had enslaved Kylo to fear, to pain, to ambition and now worst of all, he was to be enslaved to love.

Not love for Snoke, who had posed for so long as his benevolent mentor — though a despicable part of himself still longed for the twisted father-figure who’d ruled his dreams. But love for Rey, which Snoke would use as a lure he was helpless to resist.

You only know what you had when it’s lost, he thought. Another lesson of growing up, one he’d taken far too long to learn. He remembered how Rey had shone even in the darkening forest of Starkiller Base, her breath making warm clouds against his face, every muscle in her slight frame tense with the passion of battle. The light in her eyes, the moment of serenity when she reached inside herself to understand the Force in her. The moment before that, when she’d claimed the lightsaber and she stood amazed, holding it, humbled by the recognition that she must do what was right. He’d fallen in love.

_I will have none of it,_ he thought. All the things that would possess him and rule him: Snoke with his capricious reign of love and pain, his parents’ demanding love for a son they didn’t understand, his own love for Rey, who would always despise him for his bloodstained hands. Beauty he could never have.

Snoke thought he’d run to him now, to save Rey.

_You know what? Rey believes I can be free if I choose. If I believe in it enough. And Spikey….you heard her yourself once, saying, “This I choose of my own free will.”_

Kylo reached into himself, into a part that he suddenly knew, believed was there — the diseased root of Force that had tied him to Snoke all these years, somehow twinned with his own power and feeding off it. All the manifestations of Snoke, all the ways he appeared to him and haunted him and watched him were tied to _this._

Kylo unleashed his rage, finally, and ripped out his link to Snoke with all the power of his self-hatred and shame. It felt like pulling out his own intestines. No matter how much it hurt, it couldn’t hurt enough, he thought wildly, digging and digging until it was all gone.

_I’ll finish off that little bitch if it’s the last thing I do,_ was Snoke’s parting thought. Aimed at Spikey, who’d taught Kylo what freedom was.

Kylo sat quietly, breathing a little heavily. He felt for the Force within him. It was still there, and it seemed wilder than ever. A roaring current he had no desire to touch, unsure whether he could grasp it or whether it would simply carry him away. He could feel Rey in there somewhere, faint and far away.

He couldn’t just abandon her there entirely. Even if he wouldn’t run to save her as Snoke wanted, he still needed to know if he could contact her. Like it or not, he’d have to use the Force. He eased cautiously into meditation, threading his way through the Force’s instabilities.

_REY? REY!_ he called her. But her presence felt inanimate — a blank spot in the Force, present but unresponsive. Perhaps the nature of the Force-bond meant their link could never truly be severed, yet he could not rouse her out of whatever had hold of her.

Hours passed as he tried to reach her. But nothing seemed to get through. He pulled himself out of his trance feeling groggy and filled with hopeless thoughts.

Everything he touched, he destroyed. Snoke had made him a tool to catch Rey, and now she was doomed. He had no illusions about his ability to undo that.

Perhaps it would be best if he left it all behind. Maybe that was not the heroic choice, but he didn’t have the makings of a hero after all. Probably everyone had known it except him.

_What a spectacle I made of myself, running around waving my lightsaber and thinking the Force would help me rule the Galaxy,_ he thought. _I thought we’d fix everything that was wrong._

Well. The new Kylo had better get moving, he thought. He pushed himself to his feet and prowled up to the cockpit, grabbing a couple of protein bars on the way. Chewing automatically, he dumped himself gracelessly down in the pilot’s seat, feet sprawled onto the console.

The protein bars were terrible, but they took the edge off his despair as well as his hunger. Rey was probably unconscious. He could try contacting her again once she woke up — which Snoke implied would happen once she was with him.

He licked the last crumbs of the protein bars out of their packaging. He missed Spikey’s cooking. He had a sudden memory of the way it smelled when she lifted the lid on the hotboxes she carried, and her long, clever fingers assembling the food onto the dishes.

Suddenly he realised she was one person whose life he hadn’t destroyed yet. If she contacted him he’d warn her Snoke was after her. Or he could just go and get her! Spikey didn’t need somebody with Force powers to get her out of trouble, she just needed somebody with a fast ship.

He pulled up the nav computer and started plotting a course for Fariol. It didn’t take long. His spirits lifted a tiny bit as his ship boosted into the wild blue domains of hyperspace.

* * *

Days passed as the ship tunnelled its way between realities. Every few hours Kylo reached out with the Force, making his whole being into a delicate antenna tuned to Rey, always and only Rey. He felt her stir sometimes, and it gave him hope.

Halfway to Fariol the hypercomm beeped and he picked up a call from Spikey, who was bursting with excitement and self-satisfaction. She’d shaved her head and was wearing makeup. The surprise of her appearance shocked him out of his gloom for a moment.

“Hi! Deepal wired up a transmitter so we can call from home! And you can call us! And…”

“She means Deepal stole a hypercomm…” said a voice off-camera. Morse, Kylo thought.

“Yeah, he stole it. I always thought the First Order were criminals. But then he encrypted it so we can…what the Corellian hells has happened to you, Kylo?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing,” he replied, finding himself as usual swept up by her mood. “Who gave you the black eyes?”

“That’s makeup. Sheesh. Don’t worry about me.” She stopped smiling and leaned into the screen. “Are you getting any sleep? You look terrible!”

“No, not much. And it’s lucky you called, Spikey. I’ve got bad news.”

“Oh no.” She leaned back and hugged her knees to her chest. They both sat very still, drinking in the sight of each other, trying to savour an ordinary moment before they had to talk about bad things. It was difficult for Kylo to stare into anyone’s eyes after being alone so long. He could see nothing but sympathy in hers, though.

“Snoke’s got Rey,” he said.

Her eyes filled with tears. He’d forgotten how much she liked Rey. She’d known his feelings for Rey before he did himself.

“How did it happen?”

Kylo bared his teeth at the question and hit the arms of his chair. Of course she would ask that!

“Snoke was spying on my mind,” he said bitterly. “I thought I’d got rid of him, but he’s more cunning than we knew. Rey showed me a picture of her parents and he saw it. He put them in her dreams, making her believe they were some place where she needed to rescue them, I think…he had the Knights of Ren waiting for her there instead.”

“Oh no!” she whispered. “Is she…alive?”

“Yes, but I think she’s unconscious or drugged or something. I’ve been trying to reach her for days. She’s _there,_ in the Force, but asleep.”

“What can you do?”

“I can’t do _anything!_ ” he said viciously. “I’m completely useless. I don’t know where she is, same as always! And if I _did,_ what would I do against Snoke and all the Knights of Ren? On their own I could exterminate them, but all of them in a group?” He smacked his head against the back of the chair with frustration.

Spikey leaned towards the screen and reached out her hands as though to touch him. “No, no, stop that! I can’t bear to see you doing that!” She was openly crying now. “It’s Snoke, always Snoke. Don’t blame yourself!”

“I have plenty of other things to blame myself for….” he said, thinking of the little Twilek girl on the refueling station. He almost said something about it to Spikey, but stopped himself. A lot of Spikey’s sympathy would evaporate if she truly knew how many people he’d hurt.

“Yeah, well don’t dwell on them. What good does _that_ do?” she said, suddenly fiery. “There must be _something_ you can do!”

“Yes, there is. I can warn you that Snoke is out to get you. He blames you for turning me against him.”

“And so he should,” she said, with an evil grin.

“So you need to leave Fariol. It was a stupid place to leave you, it’s too obvious. You come from there, it’s the first place he’d look. And you’re not exactly invisible.”

Spikey looked aghast. “But I _can’t!_ The show — that show I was telling you about? It’s starting in four days! I’m one of the leads.”

“Do you have any of those alias identity chips left?” he went on, ignoring her protests.

“I’m under an alias _now!_ And I look different. See?” She held up a sheaf of silvery hair in two long braids — she must have had it on her lap — and draped it over her head. “See? Blonde wig. Nobody will…”

“Don’t be an idiot. The one thing anyone can tell about you is your voice. The last thing you should be doing is going on a _stage_ in front of hundreds of people, and _singing!”_

“But this is….this is…..” She jumped out of her chair, picked it up and smashed it against something offscreen until splinters flew past her head. _“Why_ does everything have to get _karked_ up by that _bastard_ just when it was all starting to go _right_ for me? This was my big chance!”

“It’s your big chance to get killed,” he muttered, but she wasn’t listening. She grabbed a pillow and hurled it past the screen. Kylo ducked.

“SPIKEY!” he shouted. She froze, holding another pillow. “Spikey, you’ve seen me smash furniture. You’re not me. Stop it. You just look stupid.”

“Yeah, well you weren’t that fucking impressive yourself.”

“You would NOT say that if I was in the same room as you!” he said.

“Yeah. But you’re not. Nyah.”

They glared at each other through the screen for a moment, and then she suddenly shook her head in disgust. “I’m sorry. You’ve got enough on your plate with Rey. You must be worried sick. You don’t need me carrying on like an idiot.” She sighed. “It’s just that I really, really want to do this…it’s what I am. All that time I was a slave, I knew I was something else. And it’s this.”

“You can’t be anything except dead, if Snoke’s people find you.”

“I’ll do the show then I’ll disappear. It only runs for ten days.” She pulled the wig off and scratched her scalp nervously. “I’ll hide when I’m not onstage…somewhere…Morse and the boys will protect me. That’s what you ordered them to do, right?” She looked up at him pleadingly. “Tell me this isn’t happening?”

He shook his head. “Sorry. You have to get out. Because I want at least one person to survive the misfortune of knowing me. You don’t know how spiteful Snoke is. He probably won’t be content to have you killed if he can torture you first.”

Spikey winced. “Sure is bad luck knowing you,” she said sadly. “Why do you have to be so unlucky, Ben?”

He blinked in surprise at hearing his other name. Caught unawares, it was as Ben that he answered.

“Apart from meeting Snoke? I think it started on Jakku. A place called Tuanul. Before that I was Snoke’s chief warrior, his protege, his apprentice…I was determined to succeed in everything he asked of me.” He nodded forcefully. “I _was_ succeeding.”

“What happened on Jakku?”

“I…lost control. I killed somebody that was challenging me, because he reminded me of my past. That I used to be Ben. And then I ordered the whole village exterminated.”

“Oh no.” She stared at him, looking shocked. “Why did you do that?”

He put his head in his hands and pulled at his hair. “I don’t know. You kill people in war, you know. I was Snoke’s interrogator. But by killing that man, I knew I’d done something for the wrong reasons. Then I wanted to destroy everyone who’d seen me do it. Maybe trying to bury one crime under a bigger crime…And it _could l_ ook like part of the war. It’s the sort of things armies do. But I had no real reason to kill those people except they’d seen me do something shameful.”

“I…guess I can’t imagine.”

He looked up at her. “There was an odd thing. A very odd thing. One of the stormtroopers that was ordered to fire on the villagers didn’t do it. I saw him, saw him in the Force. He’d made a decision, the opposite one to what I made that day. He was a nothing, a nobody, but he turned against the killing he was ordered to do. I don’t know why, but I saw what kind of man he was, and I said nothing to anyone about it.”

“Weird thing was, that stormtrooper defected and ended up friends with Rey. They left Jakku together. Finn, he called himself. I fought him on Starkiller base.”

“Oh. Did you kill him?”

“No. Him and Rey are still friends, as far as I can tell.”

“Well, that’s two people who’ve survived meeting you,” she said softly. “And wait, Rey’s not dead, you say? Don’t give up!” She looked at him a while as though trying to square the person she knew with the killer he’d described, and her eyes filled with tears again. “I need to think about this,” she said. “It’s a bit much to take in.”

“Get Morse for me, will you?” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. He felt so sure she was going to tell him she never wanted to see him again. Screw that, he was going to save her anyway.

Spikey went off to get Morse. It appeared that she shared an apartment with her three bodyguards.

Morse appeared, looking well-fed compared to his days on the Finalizer. He was chewing on something.

“Everything all right with you?” asked Kylo, aware that he wasn’t in a good position to order Morse around any more.

“I thought you said Spikey was a cleaner when she lived in the Palace,” Morse said, around his mouthful.

“She was.”

“You wouldn’t know it. She barely lifts a finger around the place.”

“That’s not true! But it’ll be a cold day in hell before I clean the refresher after Deepal’s been in it!” yelled Spikey offscreen.

“So we all have to suffer,” said Morse over his shoulder.

“At least you don’t believe in the toilet roll fairy, like Deepal does,” said Spikey. “Who do you think is going to change the….”

Deepal could be heard from a further room. “Actually there is. Your alias means “Toilet Roll Fairy” in Dathomirian.”

There was the sound of a scuffle. Morse snickered. “We’re getting on just fine, thanks for asking. What’s up, Chief?”

“Get Spikey into hiding. Grab all your false identities and money. I’m coming get you off planet.”

“She’s going to hate that. She’s got this show….”

“I know. She told me. But she can’t do the show. Snoke is _definitely_ looking for her, and he wants revenge.”

Morse looked really, really unwilling. “Errrr….this is going to be a mess.”

“I’d like to have some of my friends survive knowing me. Snoke’s already got Rey.”

“Rey’s a friend now?”

“Yes of course!” he almost shouted, amazed the entire world didn’t know that he loved Rey, even though he’d only discovered it himself. “Anyway, do what you have to do. Get Spikey out of there.” 

 

  
 

 

 

 

 


	18. The Transponder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Looking for Rey....Technology wins where the Force failed.
> 
> * * *

So late in the evening, General Organa’s command centre would be almost deserted. A few people on the graveyard shift would be plotting in the latest data from the Resistance actions around the Galaxy. The various squadrons deployed around the Galaxy were used to working independently and there was no real need for Leia to be there.

On the other hand, there was no point staying in bed if all she was going to do was to lie there wondering how Finn and Rey were getting on. They should be at Mezzala by now, Leia thought. Rey’s first combat mission as an X-wing pilot. She’d taken to it so easily that Leia had little fear for her in battle. Still, Leia was troubled by the conviction that something was wrong.

Sighing, she got up and dressed herself, waving away C3PO’s concerned inquiries.

“Just another sleepless night, Threepio. Power down and rest.”

“Perhaps a hot drink?”

“That would be nice. Send it to me at the command centre.”

As she expected, the command centre was quiet. Leia’s hands roved absently over the data imaging controls, pulling up information on the latest troop movements. It appeared that Red Squadron had been engaged in Mezzala for a few hours already. Things were moving quickly on the ground with Finn’s C and D squads too. But the tightness across Leia’s shoulders did not lessen. Something was wrong.

Dispatcher Pamich Nero was yawning over the comms consoles but she straightened up at the chime of an incoming signal. She read the callsign and looked round to Leia.

“It’s Luke,” she said. She looked at Leia’s expression. “You were expecting this?”

Leia nodded. “This, or something like it.” Luke was on a scouting mission to Moraband, hoping for leads to Snoke’s whereabouts.

Nero gave up her place in front of the console. Luke’s face appeared onscreen in 2D. He looked worried.

“Hi Leia. Are you okay?”

“Yes, except I can’t sleep. It’s well after midnight here, but I have this feeling that something is wrong.”

“Me too. I don’t know what, though. I’ve dropped out of hyperspace near Bothawui, because it’s bad enough that I’m wondering if I should turn back.”

It was comforting anyway to be able to see the face of her brother, and let her mind rest alongside his in a link that was not quite the Force, but something like it. She’d missed that. He didn’t seem much changed by his long isolation on Ahch-to. If he was less impulsive, he was also more certain of himself, and she drew strength from his presence.

A second comms unit chimed, and Nero took the call. “It’s Finn! I think it’s urgent!”

Luke and Leia exchanged glances. “I think this is it,” said Luke.

“Tell him I’m here,” Leia called over to Nero. “Patch Luke into the conversation, will you?”

The screen split in half and Finn’s face appeared on one side. He was sweating and streaked with dirt.

“General! They’ve taken Rey!”

Leia heard a groan from Luke, and she pressed her hand to her chest. Finn’s words were only confirming what they’d suspected.

“What happened?”

Finn explained how Rey had had a vision of her parents imprisoned in a machinery hangar close to where his squad was fighting. She’d gone alone to investigate. He’d been on his way to join her when suddenly a First Order ship had literally exploded out of the ground beneath the hangar. Somebody must have been hidden there, waiting for Rey. By the time Finn got there, there was nothing but an empty underground bunker with the roof blown out of it, attached to a cellar that bore signs of a lightsaber battle. The ship was gone, hitting hyperspace before it was fully clear of the atmosphere with a shock that had made the ground jump like a drum.

“Lightsaber battle?” asked Leia. “More than one lightsaber, do you think?”

“Yes. Or at least, there were only lightsaber marks, and no sign of any arms fire. Not Kylo’s though.”

“Ben’s, you mean. How do you know?”

“On the Finalizer he used to lay about him with that thing when he was mad. His lightsaber made a really wide kind of mark. We repaired the damage often enough to recognise it.”

Leia tried to imagine her son, as a grown man, still losing his temper the same way he had as a child. It made her heart hurt. Luke hissed through his teeth, far less sympathetically. He’d had to deal with more of it than she had.

“So if it wasn’t Ben…” she began.

“The Knights of Ren,” guessed Luke. “We never found out what happened to them, even if Ben wasn’t leading them lately.”

“Straight to Snoke, then,” said Leia grimly.

It was difficult to face Finn’s flat, accusing stare. He’d known this was going to happen.

“I didn’t plan this, Finn!” she said. “I wouldn’t. I love Rey as much as anyone. I would never wish this on her!”

“You might be fond of her, but still! You’d cut off your own right arm to have the chance to kill Snoke, wouldn’t you?”

Leia felt her anger rise at Finn’s insubordination. He wasn’t far from the truth, though, and that hurt.

Luke interrupted before Leia could say something she’d regret. “That’s strictly a family joke only, Finn. You don’t get to talk about arms getting cut off.”

Finn bugged his eyes at Luke, and the hostility was broken.

“We can track her, Finn. We’ll get her out!” said Leia. “But you’re right. I long for the day when we can corner Snoke in his den and finish him. Nobody wants that more than I do!”

Finn gave a slow nod. “Let’s make it happen, then.”

* * *

Days passed with no signal from Rey’s trackers. Finn arrived back from his mission looking tired and tense. He came to see Leia as soon as he’d dismissed his troops. Leia saw the question on his face, and shook her head.

“The standard tracker flatlined a few hours after they captured her. But the other one’s still sending a signal every twelve hours — are you getting that too?

Finn took his receiver disc out of a pocket. “Yes, it beeps but there’s no data.”

“We won’t get coordinates until she’s out of hyperspace. Believe me, I’ve been watching too.”

Finally the transponder coordinates came through, as she was making one of her early-morning visits to the injured in medbay. From her pocket, Leia heard a little chirp from the disc she carried at all times. She pulled it out hurriedly. The readout glowed green in the pre-dawn darkness.

Leia shook it in disbelief. There must be something wrong. The coordinates were almost all zeroes.

She started towards the command centre. Finn appeared out of the darkness at a run, his tracker making a green glow in his hand.

“What the Corellian hells is this?” he asked, catching her up. “Does yours show all zeroes?”

“Yes!” she said, accelerating to a trot to keep alongside him.

“The First Order gave us basic astro training. All zeroes is the centre of the Galaxy. There’s nothing there but a black hole!”

“I know. The biggest one in the Galaxy!”

“So you’re telling me they’re throwing Rey in the biggest black hole they can find? They must really be afraid of her!”

“No, I don’t believe that!” said Leia, almost shouting. “I think Snoke’s been hiding where nobody would think to look!”

Pamich Nero, still on the graveyard shift at the command centre, was killing time by putting her hair into cornrows.

“Get Admiral Statura in here,” Leia ordered. “And a jug of kaffa. And food. We’re probably going to be here a while.”

Nero left in a scatter of small elastic bands. Things you’d never see in the First Order, Finn thought.

Leia sat down with Finn and they pulled up the Galactic imager. They entered in Rey’s coordinates and the holomap zoomed in to a point just below the Galaxy’s centre, which showed, in this image, as a pulsing black heart. Leia’s own heart sank at the sight. It seemed dismally appropriate to Snoke.

Their tracker discs gave an apologetic “peep” and the coordinates faded. Somewhere near the Galactic centre, Rey’s biological transponder had dissolved back into its component molecules, which would swim innocently around her bloodstream for another twelve hours.

“If the coordinates are the same next time, then there must be _something_ there. Some _place,”_ Leia said.

Admiral Statura came in, wearing civvies.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t have time…”

Leia waved him silent. “It doesn’t matter. Look, we’ve had the signal come in from Rey. This is where she is — just below the centre of the Galaxy. Is there anything there?”

Statura was the closest thing Leia had to a science officer. He leaned over the holomap controls, bringing up various overlays to the visual images they had. Most of them showed a spindle of energy shooting out of the top and bottom of the black hole. Rey’s coordinates put her squarely in its path.

“This is what it looks like in gamma and radio imaging,” Statura said. “You can see she’s right in the middle of this flare. It’s one of the deadliest places in the Galaxy. There’s no way a living thing could survive in this part of space.”

“I’m betting Snoke’s found a way,” Leia said bitterly.

Nero showed up with the kaffa and rolls. They stood around the holomap, sipping their hot drinks between bites, and trying different views of the region of space around Rey’s location. One obvious feature was the scarcity of glowing blue strings marking known hyperspace routes.

“What if Poe and Chewie and I take the Millennium Falcon for a look? Just outside the flare?” asked Finn.

“You don’t want to go too close anyway. Space is so empty out there, if they were on the lookout for you, you’d really stand out to them,” said Leia.

“Can BB8 pilot a probe launcher pod?” asked Statura. “Take some shielded probes in closer, shoot them through the flare, and you pick them up again on the other side?”

“Won’t BB8 get fried?” asked Finn.

“Yes, he can’t go all the way into the flare either,” said Statura. “But we can shield him up, and he’ll be able to go in closer than you. Being a droid, Snoke and the Knights of Ren should be none the wiser.”

Leia nodded. “The Force can't sense him. Okay, Admiral, you get BB8 and the probes ready. Finn, you get Poe and Chewie in here and plan your trip. In twelve hours we’ll get another signal from Rey. If it hasn’t moved, then we’ll launch.”

“Aye-aye, General,” said Finn.

“And no heroics!” said Leia, fixing him with her beadiest stare. “Not you alone against Snoke and all the Knights of Ren!”

“Rey would tell me the same thing, if that’s any reassurance,” said Finn. “She wasn’t too happy with how I looked after fighting just one of them.”

  
* * *

“Well, that’s it,” said Finn, back in the command centre after two weeks away. The same group was assembled around the Galactic holomap, only now they had more detail thanks to the probes they’d launched. Leia squinted up at a tiny grey ball skewered by the spike of deadly radiation shooting out of the the Galactic black hole’s southern pole. Not even a planet. Just an asteroid.

Admiral Statura zoomed them in closer. “That shouldn’t be possible. It’s not orbiting anything, it’s not rotating, it’s just sitting there.”

“Shouldn’t the black hole be sucking it in?” asked Finn.

“Yes, slowly, but the flare should be pushing it out. It’s doing neither. Though you can see here…” he pointed to the asteroid’s upper surface …“the flare’s abrading the surface closest to the Galactic centre. Eventually this planet will be worn away.”

“Meanwhile it’s perfectly balanced between the push of the flare and the pull of the black hole,” said Leia. “How very fake.”

“Very,” said Statura. “I doubt it got there by itself.”

“Poe and I figured out how people get in,” Finn said. He pointed below the asteroid, where it cast a shadow in the glare of gamma rays streaming past it. “You have to drop out of lightspeed right in the centre of that eddy, with zero velocity relative to it.”

“You can’t fit more than a few ships in that spot at once. Of course, they’ll have all their sensors and weapons trained on it. Very easy for them to defend,” said Statura.

Just then Luke strolled in, peeling off his flight suit.

“Ah, I see you’ve found the problem,” he said. Leia jumped up and hugged him. He smelled of fried circuits, and she could see a lot of tension under the smile he put on for her.

“Where have you been? You were meant to be back from Moraband last week!” She wanted to bite back the words as soon as she said them. She’d said them too many times to Han Solo.

“Moraband was boring, so I took a detour on the way home,” said Luke, grinning.

“How many times have I heard that before from Han! Always right before some disaster story!” Again Leia heard the crackle of anger in her voice, and tried to undo it by massaging the tendons in Luke’s shoulders. They were tight, and he squirmed with discomfort. So maybe she wasn’t good at affectionate gestures, she thought. But at least she was trying.

“Not quite disaster.” Luke pulled his tracker disc out of his pocket. “I was too curious about Rey’s coordinates to leave it alone. What could she be doing in the Galactic centre?”

“You didn’t!”

“I did. I flew the x-wing right through the shadow of that little ball of rock. Luckily R2D2 could see the gamma ray flare with his sensors and warn me about it. So we made a hyperspace jump into that little spot, and hopped right back out again!”

“What the hell was the purpose of that? Didn’t they see you? Now they’ll know we’ve found them!”

“Hold on, calm down Sis!” Luke grabbed Leia’s wrists, which were raised ready to bat at him with frustration. “They didn’t exactly see me. They can’t keep their sensors working through that sort of crap either. Not well enough to see something as small as the x-wing, anyway.

“But they’re not relying on sensors and cannons so much anyway. They’re using the Force. A whole lot of Force-users scanning for intelligent life,” he continued.

“Oh that’s just great. The only other Jedi in the Galaxy shows up in their sights like a big fat kriffin’ target. They must have loved that.”

Luke laughed. “Thanks to Rey, I learned a trick to hide where I am from Force-users. They would have got a burst of Force telling them I was up to _something,_ but when they checked on it, they would have sensed that I was on Tatooine.”

“So you can sneak in to this place?” said Finn urgently.

Luke stopped laughing. “I can sneak me in. But that only makes one of me against all the Knights of Ren and Snoke.”

“So we need more Force users on our side,” said Leia.

There was a long silence while everyone carefully avoided mentioning Ben.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	19. Rey and Snoke 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I could make you a Queen, Rey," says Snoke.
> 
> * * *

“So. Rey. In some languages it means ‘Queen’. Did you know that?”

I opened my eyes blearily. Two heads in front of me. I squinted my eyes into focus and they became one head, grey and horribly scarred. Luke’s holo had not done justice to the repulsiveness that was Snoke. It was the eyes. I have met a lot of different races in my time on Jakku. Some of them drool or smell bad or have weird damp skin or disturbing mouths. I take them as they come, and some of them are good people. Some not so much. But Snoke, with those small, cruel eyes…

I hated him. Oh, how I hated him.

I tried to get my bearings. It was difficult, because I was terribly drugged, I could tell. My mind kept trying to wander down strange paths, and I’d find myself staring at my thumb or something, which would suddenly seem magnified and unattached to the rest of me, before shrinking back to less than normal size, becoming far away and out of my control.

Slowly I made out that my hands were bound in front of me, and something was holding me up so I hung almost upright. By turning my head I could see that I was tied to a pillar. I got my feet properly under me and stood on them.

“Queen,” said Snoke. He had a surprisingly soft voice, well-modulated, like an actor. As it should be, I thought. He’d been acting roles for years. I thought about that, and my foggy mind started to clear.

“You’ve not been treated like a queen. Not like you deserve. One such as you comes along once in a thousand generations.”

How false that sounded, I thought. What did he mean, “one such as you”? I was meant to wonder; he’d crafted that sentence as bait for my curiosity.

He stared at me, eyes pale and bright, evaluating me. I looked away.

“I would like to elevate you to your rightful place. I can do that, you know.” He kept staring at me, and I kept looking at the floor. Some aliens make your insides feel squirrellous when you first meet them, but you get used to them. I had the sense that I was never going to get comfortable with looking at Snoke. My hatred was too great.

The floor was hard and slightly translucent, and all of a piece with the walls and ceiling. Everything glowed slightly, but there were no lights, so it was as though I was suspended in a kind of dull grey crystal, lit from somewhere outside my cell. I became aware of a slow, pulsing hum that came from everywhere at once. Something I could sense with the Force rather than hear with my ears. There was an enormous power here, nearby, barely contained.

“I could put things right, you know. It’s a crime, the way you’ve been treated. Abandoned, left to live or die.”

Finn would come for me, if he could find me. My fuzzy thoughts cleared a little more, and I tried to check the inside of my arm without making it too obvious. There was nothing but a healing scar on my arm where the transponder had been. I heard Snoke give a grunt of satisfaction. He knew what I was looking for.

I looked at my fingers. They kept swelling and shrinking too, and if I stared at them hard I could feel Snoke losing me. He was trying to use the Force to command my attention, but I wouldn’t give it.

He really wasn’t that good at reading people, I thought. Obviously this tack wasn’t working with me, so why pursue it? He should have caught me when I was young. He’d managed to drive Kylo nearly mad, but he’d got into his mind when he was still a child. Kylo had longed for acceptance. I didn’t, really.

I reached for the Force in me, looking for a weapon. It was the oddest sensation. For months now I’d been able to reach into it, like plunging my hands into a river, and draw out all kinds of wonders. Strength, insight, magic powers, all as easy as cupping my hands to hold things and fling them where I liked. Now I was trying to grab something with invisible hands made of cloud. I could hold nothing.

Snoke’s regard sharpened. He could at least read what I was trying to do.

“I have spent a long time developing those drugs. You can have your Force powers back when we reach an agreement.”

So that was the deal, was it? For a few moments I was almost overwhelmed with panic, but I made myself stuff down the fear, just as I had so many times when I was confronted with people who outmatched me in size and strength and weaponry. I’d survived before I knew how to use the Force. Easy come, easy go. Life on Jakku was like that all over.

We waited each other out. I knew perfectly well what my part of the script was. I was meant to ask “Where am I? What are you going to do to me?” But I wouldn’t. Instead I thought of those little desert lizards that I loved so much on Jakku. They’d keep so still, unblinking, and not let on they’d even seen you. They wouldn’t react at all. And then they were suddenly gone. I didn’t know how I’d do that part, but in the meantime I’d hold myself still, the way they did.

He wanted me to ask about my parents. Were they really alive? Did he know where they were? I wouldn’t let his lips soil their names by speaking of them.

Snoke started to walk around me slowly, observing me from all sides. He was very tall. I shut my eyes, but I could still hear his grimy grey robes brushing the floor in a circle around me.

I wanted this stupid game to be over.

“You want to be lord of the Galaxy, do you?” I asked. “You, with your ugly face! You think those scars look impressive? And whatever the seven hells you’re wearing isn’t even clean. I’m not impressed!”

He leaned in suddenly close and hissed at me. “What I look like doesn’t matter. You will learn the reality within. You will learn who I _am!”_

“Even uglier on the inside,” I said.

“You say that now, but you will learn to _worship_ me!” he snarled.

“You’re confusing me. First you say I’m a queen and people should adore me, and now you’re the one who wants all the worship. Which is it?”

He leaned in again, eyes full of malice. “Oh, you’ll understand soon enough,” he said with mock gentleness. He reached out with his skeletal fingers to touch my face. I heard and felt a hot spark sizzle between us, and he drew his hand back quickly. My cheek burned. I think the burn to his hand was worse though. He was trying to keep his fingers still, but I could tell he wanted to shake the pain out.

“Hurts, does it?” I said. I’d had worse myself, using a welding torch.

He flung out his hands at me, his already-contorted face twisted with rage. Blue lightning streamed from his fingertips and my nerves came alight with pain such as I’d never imagined. Pain as though my skin was burning, and pain as though my insides were being twisted and torn. I must have thrown myself against my restraints, screaming. All I know is that afterwards my throat was raw and I had deep lines of bruises and cuts where the ropes had dug into me.

As a child, fear had driven me so far into myself that Luke had had to take my memories from me if I was to survive at all. I tried to find that place inside myself. A place I could go, with all my thoughts, and never let the world touch me again.

Whispers of the Force surrounded me, insubstantial as ghosts. I couldn’t touch the Force. But I could retreat from the world.

And one more thing. A tiny voice, far away. One I never thought I would welcome so much.

_Rey, Rey it’s me!_

Kylo. He was calling for me.

_I’m here!_ I said. And my call went out along the other thing I still had, the Force-bond we’d made so unwillingly all those months ago. It was even stronger than whatever terrible drug Snoke was using to hold me back from the Force.

And there I went, somehow, along the link to Kylo. I felt his bitterness and rage spread like wings to protect me, and his darkness was my shelter. I was safe inside, gone from my body that hurt so much.

_Is he hurting you?_ Kylo seemed wild, his Force powers whipping around him, looking for a target.

_He was. He’s using the Force-lightning I think. I can’t use the Force back. But it’s okay, it doesn’t hurt while I’m here with you._

He was shocked, and hardly knew what to do with me. But there was a part of him that was used to this kind of invasion, and both longed for it and hated it. I understood right away.

_I will NEVER crawl into you in secret and try to steal your thoughts. This is what I am. See me: My name is Rey. I come from Jakku, and I will never pretend to you or try to control you simply because I’m able to come into your head._

There was a feeling back from him, indescribable. Something warm, something breaking, something like tears of relief. He needed to hear that from me so badly.

Dimly I was aware of Snoke flinging the Force-lightning against me until my body spasmed. But I couldn’t really feel it. I hung on to Kylo through our Force-bond for dear life. _Please! You can protect me! That’s all I need from you._

I felt his wonder and something even stronger. Joy.

_Yes, yes I can! Stay with me, Rey._

I must have blacked out. I came around enough to know that I was being carried somewhere, and thought I recognised the outline of one of the Knights of Ren in the near-darkness. Then something pricked my neck and I lost consciousness again.

I woke again in the same cell: a grey, translucent cube with nothing in it except a drain in the floor and the pillar I’d been tied to. I could see smears of blood on it. I wasn’t bound any more. There was nothing to lie on, so I stayed where I was on the floor.

Snoke hadn’t killed me. Of course he hadn’t killed me. I had something he wanted.

All I wanted was not to be hurt again. Every time I thought of the torture I shook. But now I had Kylo as my secret weapon.

My leather wristguard had a metal buckle. I took it off, pulled the tongue free of the buckle and scratched it against the wall. It made a mark.

I had no way of telling the time, but I would call this Day One.

I was used to waiting.

 

 

 


	20. Fariol

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _I’m here!_ she said, and Kylo felt her presence growing stronger. She was in terrible pain, pain he recognised all too well. Snoke had used it on him sometimes. How could he have forgotten that? But he remembered it now, and the memory filled him with fury. 
> 
> * * *

The hypercomm signal sounded again, a day out from Fariol. Kylo winced. Probably Spikey calling to tell him she’d thought about Tuanul village, and she’d decided she wanted nothing to do with him. Too bad, he was going to find her and hide her from Snoke whether she wanted him to or not.

The screen lit up and sure enough, it was Spikey. She looked anxiously at him, no doubt seeing his grim expression.

“Anything from Rey?” she began.

“Not yet. She’s alive, that’s all I can feel.”

“You know what you told me about what happened on Tuanul?” she went on carefully.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I think you need to. Not with me. With Rey. If you’re able to talk with her again, I mean.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Because she needs to know how much you regret it!”

“Did I say I regret it?”

“You hate yourself, Kylo. You think she’s never going to forgive you!”

“And she never would. She’s so judgemental.”

“Well she’s not perfect herself! I mean, she’s awesome, but that doesn’t mean she has no faults. You just told me she’s judgemental.”

“Shut up!”

“No! Look, you’re putting her on this pedestal where you think she’s so perfect that she could never forgive you, and so you go on beating yourself up about your worthlessness. Stop it! It only weakens you!”

Kylo glared at her. His hand hovered over the “off” button and Spikey moved as if to reach through the screen and slap it away.

“She’ll need you to be strong, if you ever link again. And she’ll need to trust you. She can’t do that if you’re always putting on a front, pretending to be who you’re not. She’ll never trust you unless you start trusting her.”

“She’d probably rather jump into Snoke’s arms than hear what I told you the other day.”

“Don’t be a fucking fool! Have you ever wondered why you would tell _me_ rather than her? Try being her friend instead of making her into some idealised goddess you’re in love with…”

Kylo stabbed a finger at the screen. “We can argue about this _in person_ tomorrow, because I’m coming to take you away.”

“No! You can’t! I have to…” she began, but he just grinned at her and turned off the hypercomm.

* * *

Whatever she had to do, she didn’t get to do it. When Kylo dropped out of hyperspace above Fariol, the common news bands were alight with the story of the attack on an opera house attached to Fariol’s biggest university in Montjau. A small First Order military transport had dropped out of space onto the forecourt and unleashed a pod of super battle droids who blasted their way into the auditorium during a final dress rehearsal. Then they blew up themselves and the entire building. There were no survivors, and no comment from the First Order either.

Numbly, Kylo let his ship drift in orbit. He called Spikey’s hypercomm unit, but there was no reply. He scanned the news services. Experts were at a loss to find any motive for the attack. The opera, a student production, had no message that could offend any political group. The victims included nobody of importance. There would be a commemorative service for them.

Kylo scanned the list of names, but recognised none of them. He realised he didn’t know what name Spikey went under; whether she was still “Korimako”, the little stuffed bird she’d taken as a name for her alias.

Morse had sent him the address where they were living. Not knowing what else to do, Kylo landed the ship at the nearest spaceport and simply left it there to take its chances among hundreds of other ships parked around the place.

Public transport took him to the oldest part of Montjau and he walked to Spikey’s apartment. It was in a neighbourhood of narrow streets near the university, full of old buildings built in the cream and gold bricks the city favoured. The only sound was the soft hum of of personal transports, which moved slowly, and a wild threading of birdsong from the cages that seemed to hang from every balcony. It seemed a peaceful, well-ordered city, and it was no wonder the citizens were at a loss to explain the First Order’s bizarre and hostile actions.

As he approached Spikey’s address, he spread out his Force senses, but nobody was watching him. He stood in front of the green door that belonged to her building, feeling around the lock with the Force, but there was no need. The door opened and a Mirialan man came out, barely glancing at Kylo. He had some sort of an instrument case over his shoulder and he was consumed with anxiety about a rehearsal. Kylo pushed past him and went up the stairs. Her apartment was on the third floor, and the door wasn’t even locked. He went in.

It showed every sign of a life interrupted. The clothes hanging on the back of a chair, the pots of herbs growing in the windowsill. A stand with a datapad of music still propped on it. The smell, above all. He almost couldn’t bear to look at the kitchen, full of her pans and plates. The air was still filled with the scent of meals like the ones he’d shared with her once.

He noted dully that she certainly hadn’t wasted the money he’d given her. Everything was very basic, with just a few colourful pieces of printed cloth and some posters decorating the walls. Morse, Sorgen and Deepal each had a room. He saw their beds were made with military precision. They must have been with her when the attack happened.

The newest thing in the apartment was the hypercomm console. There was a plastic disc bodged onto the controls. The encryption module that would reach his ship. He pulled it off and crushed it under his heel.

Spikey’s room was messier, piled with books and holos. He sat on the bed, from where he could see out the open window to the apartments on the other side of the street. The sound of some sad instrument floated in from one of them, repeating variations on a falling phrase. Somebody passing in the street below answered with an ululating melody in a language he didn’t know. A woman shouted a reply, “We will remember them!” and her voice seemed on the verge of tears.

The whole city was in mourning for a senseless act, he realised. Many of the musicians killed would have lived right here alongside Spikey.

Eventually Kylo lay down on her bed, which still had her salty, musky smell. Some of her long kinked hairs were on the pillow, and he collected them together into a little knot. It grew dark, and still he lay there. He had a half-formed idea that he would wait and see if anyone came to check she was dead, somebody that could lead him to the perpetrators. He would exact some terrible revenge.

Around midnight he felt something spring to life within him, the Force growing electric with tension. Something was awakening. He had a sudden surge of hope.

_Rey! Rey! It’s me!_ he called through the Force.

And there she was! Faint and weak, but alive!

_I’m here!_ she said, and Kylo felt her presence growing stronger. She was in terrible pain, pain he recognised all too well. Snoke had used it on him sometimes. How could he have forgotten that? But he remembered it now, and the memory filled him with fury.

_I can’t use the Force back. But it’s okay, it doesn’t hurt while I’m here with you,_ she said.

And the sense of her presence grew stronger, as though she were literally crawling towards him along their Force-bond. Invading his mind. He shivered. There was an empty space inside him where Snoke had lived for so long. She might slide in there.

_I will NEVER crawl into you in secret and try to steal your thoughts,_ she said. _Please! You can protect me! That’s all I need from you._

She tried to show him who she was: the fierce, independent girl who roamed the desert on a landspeeder she built herself, who claimed and climbed the silent wrecks in the darkness, who gritted her teeth against pain and flung insults in Snoke’s face.

_This is what I am. See me: My name is Rey. I come from Jakku, and I will never pretend to you or try to control you simply because I can get into your mind._

Kylo felt fear drain out of him.

He wished he could throw his arms around her and dance her round the room.

_Yes, yes I can! Stay with me, Rey._ He was smiling through tears. He could save her!

He pulled Spikey’s blankets around him and curled up, letting Rey’s presence nestle against him as though she was tucked in there with him. Somewhere Snoke’s punishments lashed at her body, but Rey was here, safe. So deep within him that his spine and ribs were a castle to defend her, his shoulder-blades a shelter for her head.

* *

He left the apartment the next morning but decided against returning to his ship. It was too full of ghosts. Instead he drifted around the city that had been Spikey’s. There was noise from the centre of the city, and he followed the sound to the edge of a crowd in a large old square. The funeral procession was passing. Long trumpets sent mournful calls over their heads. Many people were dressed in costumes, wild and fanciful things from the world of the theatre. Even he recognised them, the gods and heroes of the old stories Spikey had read to him.

Kylo saw a group of people rush in, dressed in black with crudely-drawn imitations of the First Order insignia. They attacked a group of people in bird-headed masks carrying coloured flags, who roared with rage and fought back. In the developing riot, Kylo picked up a fallen flag and laid about him with a will, scything a path through the First Order supporters until they took to their heels. It felt incredibly satisfying.

He jumped as somebody clapped him on the back. A young man still with a bird-head mask, so battered that Kylo could see most of his wispily-bearded young face.

“Good work, man!” said he said, and ran off.

* *

Kylo was not sure how the next few days passed. He wandered around the city, which was full of ghosts of Spikey. They were friendlier than the ghosts on board his ship, though sadder. Among the posters on the walls advertising different entertainments he occasionally saw a tattered old one showing a picture of a stuffed toy bird: reminders of Spikey’s other existence as a club singer. He went to the cafes where she’d sung, and found them full of students arguing passionately about politics and current affairs. He would listen, brooding over cups of kaffa that he never paid for. He waited for the flutter of Rey’s spirit, moving to curl under his heart. She was not always able to speak, but he could feel her, a sense of sunlight and steel, buoying him up.

_Where are you?_

_I don’t know. I’ll try to find out,_ she said. _Where are you?_

He told her and she asked, tentatively, about Spikey. He told her about Spikey’s death with as little detail as possible. She surprised him with her genuine sorrow. He’d never understand women, he thought.

_I hate Snoke so much!_ she snarled over the link, and he felt her will regaining its steel.

_Weren’t you jealous of her?_ he asked after a few days, when perhaps it might be safe to do so.

_Yes. No! I don’t know. Don’t be so arrogant. Who do you think you are?_ she snapped back.

The next day, though, she said, _I would not have believed there was any good in you if I hadn’t seen you with her. Without her, how could I have trusted you enough to come to you now, when you’re the only one that can protect me?_

New people took Spikey’s apartment. Kylo took Spikey’s bedding and moved it into the lightwell of the apartment block, finding a sheltered corner above a ventilation duct. It was warm, and could only be reached, as he did, by making a Force-leap from a stairwell window to a ledge that rounded a corner to his hidden den.

He could hear the lives around him. The couple who argued. They were out of work and desperate for money. The ones who worried their child wasn’t right because he threw stones at the other children. The young lesbian couple, both musicians, who threw parties full of music and drugs that reached a peak of hilarity and inspired improvisations before ending in jealous fistfights. The person who practiced that mournful instrument.

One day he was confronted by a small angry boy as he left his favourite cafe. One of the sons of the owner.

“You haven’t paid!” The boy had a big scowl on him.

“I have so,” said Kylo, drawing himself up to his full height and scowling back.

“You haven’t. You never do. I’ve been watching you. You’ve got my dad fooled, but you don’t fool me.”

Kylo reached for the Force to smooth it over the boy’s mind, but he could tell that this beetle-browed child wasn’t one to be easily overcome. He was still staring up at Kylo, fists balled.

“Would you like me to pay?” he asked sourly.

“Yes!” said the boy, obviously thinking it was a stupid question. Then he screwed up his face and said, after a pause, “Unless… you could help me shift some things?”

“I’m not busy,” said Kylo, which was more than true. The boy turned on his heel and gestured Kylo to follow. They went to an alley behind the cafe where a roadskimmer was hovering, loaded up with foodstuffs in bales and boxes. Kylo helped move them into the cafe’s storeroom, easily carrying loads that the boy struggled with.

“I won’t tell my dad,” said the boy, once they’d finished.

Kylo didn’t care whether he did or not. Somehow he became known as somebody who would lend a hand here and there, either at the cafe or at the open air markets nearby. People paid him, or gave him food, and found other work for him to do. It had more dignity than begging or stealing, though he didn’t greatly care about that either. He lived half on the streets, listening always for Rey.

One day at the cafe he sat at a table where somebody had left a datapad book behind.

_Politics 101: an introduction to systems and societies,_ he read. He paged through it idly, wondering how it would compare to politics as he’d experienced it, furiously ,debated around the dining room table when he was a boy. He’d found it boring and irritating. To his young mind, it had seemed obvious what people should do. Somebody should just make them do it without all that tortuous negotiation. Now, as an adult, he read about the structures that his parents had fought for and against all their lives. It looked completely different.

“You doing pols too?” said a young woman who appeared suddenly at his table. He looked at her blankly. “Is that — I left my book here…” She pointed to the book he was reading. He gave it to her and she gave him a friendly smile before walking off.

He waited a few moments and drifted after her. She was headed for the university. He followed her into some sort of hall where a debate was in progress. Or perhaps it was a lecture. It was hard to tell. It all seemed very disorderly, and left him with a lot to think about.

His clothes got shabbier. He used the university’s refreshers when he could, but even so sometimes people moved to sit farther away from him. He didn’t care, but haunted the lecture theatres, which were warm, listening with half an ear while waiting for Rey’s presence. She didn’t haunt him, but kept her visits to times of absolute need. She seemed to value his freedom more than he did.

_Are you eating, Kylo? It’s bad enough Snoke starving me without having to suffer your hunger pangs as well!_

_This’ll be over in a few minutes and then I’ll get something_ , he thought.

_What are you listening to?_

_Economics._

_Why?_

_Because I don’t know anything about it. My parents and their friends…their lives revolved around this stuff. I have to figure out why it mattered so much to them. I hated the way it interrupted our lives all the time, them rushing off to deal with some crisis…but I’m starting to see why they did it._

Sometimes the students sat respectfully, taking notes or muttering into their pads. Sometimes the lectures were a veritable shouting match. Kylo never joined in, but sat wondering how the First Order believed it could take the huge unwieldy mass of peoples making up the Galaxy, and make them dance to the same tune.

But they did believe that. The attack on the opera house was just the opening salvo to a time of increasing unrest. Kylo saw lectures and meetings violently disrupted by people wearing home-made First Order insignias. They’d run in, shouting slogans, until the other students tackled them and dragged them off. Kylo joined in with a violence that terrified the other students even as they cheered him on.

Kylo didn’t want to worry Rey with the news. She visited him along the Force-link when she needed to get away from some horror of Snoke’s, so why add to her troubles? Instead he looked for treasures to share with her when she came.

_People love birds here, Rey. In the shopping precincts you see rich women ride around on skimmers with birds in cages. Mostly songbirds, but they have these clever black-and-white ones with sharp beaks too that will sit on a person’s shoulder. People think nothing of taking them into business meetings. I’ve even seen people in Parliament making speeches with a bird on their wrist!_

_That must be beautiful!_ said Rey.

_The new city centre is something to see to_ o, he told her. _Lots of tall buildings with sun-panels, and at dawn, you hear a rustling sound as all the vanes turn to the sunrise and turn from silver-grey to green. They make power._

_Ah!_ said Rey.

_And the way they treat children…Complete strangers, if a child walks into a shop or cafe, they address it as “my heaven, my sweetness, my little sun, my queen”._

_Ha, Snoke calls me his queen sometimes too. It doesn’t sound so good coming from him,_ Rey thought wryly. _But go on, tell me more._

_If somebody brings a baby into the cafe everything just about comes to a standstill,_ he thought. _Children are so loved everywhere._

_It sounds wonderful,_ Rey thought.

_It hurts to see it sometimes, to be honest. I wish I’d had that,_ he thought, after a pause.

_Me too._

He went to concerts and plays, using the Force to walk in unseen and hover like a shadow behind the audience. One night, many musicians came together to play something in a great hall. He marvelled at how many people it took to make that music. With the Force, he could feel their minds, many threads braided into one thought.

Somewhere in the performance, the music opened up into an vast abyss, and someone stepped forward to fill it with the powerful dark notes of that mournful instrument he’d heard around his apartment block. The people sitting around Kylo sighed, and he felt Rey sigh too. It left him shaken.

_I needed that,_ she said. _Snoke can’t touch that._

Not for want of trying, he thought. The unrest was continuing, fomented by the First Order not only on Fariol but the other peaceful planets of its sector. But he kept that thought from her. She had enough struggles of her own.

And so he fed her his strength, and it gave him life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * * *
> 
> Finally, a little Reylo.


	21. Rey and Snoke 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope nope!
> 
> * * *

There was no time in the cell, so I said it was morning whenever I woke up. The first thing I did was to make a mark on the wall. As I did it, I would sift through my thoughts and dreams. Snoke had got into my mind to give me those dreams. There had to be a way to protect myself, and I was determined to find it. 

With practice, I found that Snoke’s ideas had a flavour I could detect. Those ones I banned from my mind, along with the thoughts that told me to despair and to give in. Even if he didn’t give me those thoughts, they were ones he would like me to have, so I rejected them. 

“I’m still here, I’m still alive,” I told myself every morning. “My name is Rey, and I come from Jakku.”

I needed to remind myself of that because when I used the Force-bond to check on Kylo, which I did every morning, it felt like the Force was pouring past me, threatening to unravel me. If I did it too much, I would fray at the edges. I wouldn’t be me any more.

_The Force feels different here,_ I told Kylo. _Snoke’s drugs keep me from touching it, but I’m almost glad. Even if I could use it, I think it would eat me alive._

_It doesn’t feel quite right to me either,_ he said.

_Does Snoke try to get in your head at all?_ I asked. 

_No, but can you check? I’ve been fooled so many times before._

It was a big deal for him to admit a weakness like that. So we made a habit of checking on each other’s minds for any traces of what we called “Snokeness” as well as we could without invading each other’s privacy.

_There’s a trick I learned while I was in the First Order Palace. It’s a way of hiding your thoughts,_ said Kylo. He showed me, and I saw how it related to the other ways I could hide myself. 

_This is good, I said. He already finds it hard to read my thoughts. This’ll make it even harder._

_Some minds are hard to get into,_ said Kylo. _If they’re very different to yours, it’s painful._ Of course as Snoke’s interrogator, Kylo would know that. That was an ugly thought and I could feel Kylo winding up over it.

_Forget it, there’s no point dwelling on that,_ I thought hastily. _Anyway, it hurts Snoke to even touch me, let alone get in my head._

_Good._ I could feel Kylo’s satisfaction at that. _But anyway, show me how well you can hide your thoughts now._

I did what he’d shown me. 

_That’s good. It’s like your mind is a ball of mercury. All reflections and little droplets running away everywhere. Completely opaque,_ he told me.

Days passed. The Knights of Ren would come in, never less than six at a time, to administer the drugs that kept me under their control. One drug to separate me from the Force, one drug to keep me physically weak, and another if they needed to knock me out completely. 

From their muttered conversations I learned that too much and too often would kill me, so they couldn’t rely on them too much. At times the drugs cleared my system and they worked in shifts with Snoke to use their Force to suppress mine. 

_How are the Knights treating you?_ said Kylo, worried. Being Kylo, “worried” meant he was also aching with the desire to hurt them, and ashamed of having had anything to do with them.

_They must have orders not to hurt me,_ I said reassuringly. 

_I’m the one that should be reassuring you,_ he thought uncomfortably, and made an effort to hide his worries from me. After that, whenever we linked he told me about things that might make me happy: Montjau, the city of birds, the way people lavished affection on children, the high-spirited young people around him debating their ideas, his neighbours who made up after quarrelling, the music that seemed to be everywhere. He seemed to spend his days looking for things I might like so he could bring them to me as little treasure-memories. His care strengthened me and warmed me through the terrible days.

Maybe a week went by before Snoke saw me again. His mistake, because I’d had all that time to prepare myself, including Kylo’s reminders, every day, that everything he said was lies.

This time the Knights bound my hands and took me to a black chamber where Snoke sat on a throne. They stood me before him and took up positions standing in a row behind me. Snoke got up and walked around me as though he needed to observe me from all angles. I could feel his Force bearing down on me to control me, his mind trying to read mine. I kept my thoughts concealed, and felt his Force sliding off them, getting no purchase.

“Are you ready to talk to me now?” he asked, once he was in front of me again. Pretending he hadn’t tried anything.

“How about you do the talking? I can tell you’d like to,” I said. 

“All right. Rey, I feel that you don’t understand the power that we could wield if we joined forces. There is literally nothing we could not do with the power we could command.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, in my least encouraging voice.

“NO!” he roared. Kylo had told me he did this sometimes. Like a faulty volume control. I admit I flinched though. 

“No!” he said more softly. “You don’t understand. You suffer from a failure of the imagination. I can correct that. Together we can dream things that normal people dare not even think, and we can MAKE THEM HAPPEN!”

He tried to force his face into a friendlier expression. No kidding, I could actually hear him thinking “I must put on my benevolent face”.

“What could _you_ know, after all, growing up in a place like Jakku? Your imagination starved for knowledge…” he said gently. “I could teach you so much. And when it is done, we could undo all the hurt, all the ills…” He leaned towards me encouragingly. (“I must look encouraging”). 

I thought of lizards, and how much I preferred all of them to him.

“Could we bring back my parents?” I said.

He straightened up, smiling. “Ah, now you begin to understand. I knew you weren’t stupid.”

“So, can we?” I persisted.

He put his hand on his face and rubbed along one of his scars with a fingertip as though thinking. Perhaps he had no idea how nauseating that looked. What the hell was in there?

“We could. We could. All we have to do is to….” He paused and gave me a bright-eyed look. “…to become _gods._ And that’s something you can do.”

“I can make you a god?” I said, smoothing down my thoughts. I remembered the human sacrifices. I didn’t want him to know I knew.

“YESSSS!” he said in a kind of triumphant hiss, and now he was pushing his mind against mine, the Force in him saying _do it! do it! do it! do it!_

“Any god in particular? On Jakku, us scavengers had lots to choose from. Coppertine, Ironhand, The Heart of Glass who has her own constellation of stars in the spring sky, the Noon Howler, and of course, R’iia.”

Snoke stared at me for a while, nonplussed. 

“You knew Kylo how long, and you still can’t spot sarcasm? That’s incredible,” I muttered. Snoke’s eyes narrowed. He was reasonably sensitive to insults, then. 

He leaned forward threateningly. “Kylo Ren knew _better_ than to use sarcasm around me!”

“And I know better than to believe a word you say. Gods, huh! Pfft!”

“Yes, gods” he said firmly. He put on his benevolent face and held his arms out towards me like a religious icon. 

Preemptive, I thought. 

“All I ask is that you come to me.”

I sighed and let my shoulders drop as though I were giving in. 

“All right,” I said, and took a step towards him. He looked at me as though he could not believe his good luck. He was right to be sceptical. Two steps in, and I was close. Three steps, staring beatifically at his face, holding his gaze, and he couldn’t see my foot lift up high, high, and smash down on his kneecap. He doubled over so fast he nearly cracked my skull with his chin. 

The Knights of Ren surged forward in a mass and dragged me off him. 

_LOCK HER UP AGAIN!!!_ he screamed, still bent over massaging his knee. _You are going to PAY for this!_ he shouted at me. 

No doubt I would. But I’d learned something. Not only did he believe his own sarlacc-shit stories but he was far too ready to believe I’d fall for them too.

* *

They tied me to the pillar in my cell and left me there for days. I couldn’t lie down, I could barely sleep. They left me without food.

My name is Rey. I come from Jakku. I have gone without food before.

I could still make my little marks with the buckle of my wrist strap. I made them on the pillar instead.

Snoke came in at last, after a long while.

“You don’t need to suffer like this. You could be the queen of all the stars. It would be so easy. Just let me know when you’re ready to discuss our mutual interests”

“We don’t have any,” I said. He swept out. Or flounced out, however you’d see it.

More days. I had soiled myself. There was no choice, tied as I was. If he wanted to humiliate me, he needed to try harder, I thought. 

My name is Rey. I come from Jakku. 

Like most people on Jakku, I’d drunk my own urine when there was no other choice, and lived to tell the tale. It would take more than this to make me hate my own body or anything that came from it. 

“Look at you! What a pathetic sight, covered in your own shit,” said Snoke the next time he came in.

“I’ve seen worse,” I said. “You, for instance.” He glared at me. 

“That wasn’t sarcasm,” I clarified.

He lost his temper and raised his hands, crackling with the Force lightning. I went away, away, deep inside myself and out all the way to Kylo.

_He could have learned more self-control in a thousand years,_ I thought.

_I think he’s been waiting so long, it’s torturing him past his limits having you there and STILL not getting what he wants. He’s spent so long planning it all, and he thought he’d finally succeeded,_ thought Kylo.

_It’s really winding him up,_ I agreed. We shared a moment of smugness. Kylo was my fortress, and he glowed with the consciousness of knowing it too.

Hunger came and went, but the worst thing was when they withheld water. 

My name is Rey. I come from Jakku. I know my old friend thirst.

Thirst so my tongue swelled and my lips cracked and I wanted to lick the pillar because it was cold. I cricked my neck trying, but I couldn’t reach. It wouldn’t have done any good. I sunk into the dream, endlessly repeated, of tipping out the last of my waterbottle into my mouth. The dream water was so good, for an instant. So cold. Then it turned to sand, caking my dry mouth.

_That's your dream, Snoke. Out_. And I threw him out. But still I dreamed of water. Familiar dreams from my days on Jakku, stranded in a sandstorm. Days and days. I knew my kidneys would give out soon. I knew my limits exactly. I was dizzy, nauseous, hanging on the cords that bound me to the pillar. My bonds cut me but my blood barely oozed. 

_Rey, what’s happening?_

_I’m very thirsty. Can you take me for a while? I don’t think I can travel the link myself._

I had a sense as though strong arms were lifting me up, out of my body. The Force whipping around us, sifting through my fingers that were helpless to grasp it. But Kylo was strong in the Force, and the Force-bond was strong between us. He carried me so I didn’t have to feel my suffering body.

But it wasn’t safe. If I stayed too long the Force would wear me away. 

_My name is Rey, and I come from Jakku. I did not know who I was so I made my own soul._

_I see you. I know you,_ thought Kylo, and held me as best he could. His rage was my shield.

* *

Snoke needed me too much to let me die. We all knew that. Eventually he came to me bearing a cup and a jug of water. I was so weak I had to allow him to tip it into my mouth, a bit at a time.

“Look how I restore you to life. Verily, I bring you back from the dead,” he murmured. “Already, I have that power. Right now, I am like a god to you.”

Indeed it felt like a religious experience, the renewed life flushing through me, infusing me with hope. A pleasure beyond belief. But I still didn’t believe his happabore shit stories for a moment. Instead I remembered things I’d read about life, and imagined my own cells, busy about their work, sucking up the water they needed because that’s what cells do. The same miracle they always had been.


	22. Kidnapped!

Spikey sat in her dressing room, fiddling with her false eyelashes. They kept sticking to her fingers. The final dress rehearsal was that afternoon, and she’d come in early to practice putting on her costume. She had a couple of quick costume changes that she had barely managed in time in previous rehearsals, and she needed to practice them. At this rate, the lashes alone were going to take from now until the overture, and it wasn’t even lunchtime yet. She made a noise of irritation and tried again. 

Great, now there were lashes stuck to three fingers and one eyebrow. She waggled that eyebrow at the mirror. It was a pity this opera wasn’t a comedy. Though might well become one, if she didn’t get the hang of these things, she thought.

She jumped slightly as the door behind her opened unexpectedly. There was hardly anyone around the building at this hour of the morning. 

It was Morse, and he looked on edge. It took a lot to make him look like that, but Kylo’s warnings about Snoke had had an effect, and the boys were all looking pretty grim. Spikey had taken to sleeping at a friend’s place to avoid getting into discussions about her coming performances, but obviously he knew to look for her at the opera house.

“It must be lunchtime,” he said, with a rather forced-looking smile.

“Not really. What’s up?”

“Nothing. Let’s go eat.”

“Let me finish this…”

Morse regarded her face critically. “That’s completely botched, unless you are playing some sort of four-eyed alien. Come and eat, and start again fresh later.”

He had a point. Spikey scrubbed the lashes off her hands and face, and followed him out into the corridor. She was surprised to find Deepal and Sorgen there as well, both carrying large bags slung over their shoulders. They handed a third one to Morse.

“You guys going somewhere after?”

“We all are,” said Sorgen shortly. 

“I’m not. I have the show.”

“Not any more, you don’t. Your understudy’s getting her big break.”

“Says who?” said Spikey, her voice rising. She started to back away. 

“Says all of us. Morse, get her.”

Spikey dodged under Morse’s arm. He grabbed her braid and it slid off her head. He tripped her, and she rolled straight into her dressing room, spinning around on her back like a beetle to kick the door shut behind her.

The door shuddered under heavy blows. Spikey looked around wildly. The dressing room had a window, but it had bars on it. She jumped up on a table and heaved at them but they were too solid to shift. 

The door jumped under two shots that sent the hinges popping across the room, sizzling hot. Morse was the first man in. Spikey leaped from her perch on the windowsill, kicking his head with her heels. Both of them fell to the ground, but Spikey was up first, just in time to fend off Sorgen with her nails. Unfortunately, being fakes, they broke off. Not before leaving bloody tracks on his face. Morse, still on the floor, yanked her feet out from under her. Deepal simply walked in and sat on her, twisting one arm up behind her back in one economical motion.

“Now, that’s not how friends behave, is it?” he said mildly. Spikey bit his ankle. 

“No it’s not!” she spat through a mouthful of tendons. 

“Give it up, Spikey. We’re sick of arguing with you. Kylo said go, and we’re going,” said Sorgen. 

Deepal jerked her arm up further and further until she unclamped her jaws. Morse pulled her to her feet, putting an arm around her. 

“Let me go! I’m not going anywhere with you!” she said, drumming her heels on his insteps. Morse was wearing combat boots, and clearly didn’t care.

“I should have worn boots,” said Deepal, bending over to inspect his bleeding ankle. She kicked him in the head, and he staggered against the dressing table. A shelf of cosmetics broke and dumped its contents on him.

“And a helmet too,” said Morse. “Okay, enough fun and games. Let’s go.”

“NO!”

“This blaster says ‘yes’,” said Morse, and she felt something hard pressed against her ribs. 

She opened her mouth to scream.

“Not one squeak or I’ll fire,” he said. She looked around in a panic. All three of them were looking at her with no expression. “Look normal. Or else!” he murmured quietly in her ear.

They left the dressing room together, picking up the bags they’d dumped in the corridor. She could see the carved head of her chitarra poking out the end of one of them. Morse kept his arm around her, the blaster hidden under his bag.

“What? What is this?” she hissed, trying to look calm.

“We’ve got to go. Deepal’s been listening in on the First Order channels, and the word has gone out to look for you here on Fariol. It’s only a matter of time before they find you.”

The men herded her to a skimmer that was hovering by the stage door. People were strolling past on all sides, shopping and chatting. Just a normal day. Spikey got in, eyes darting around everywhere looking for a way out. But Morse’s blaster remained pressed against her body. Sorgen got in the driver’s seat and fired it up. Deepal wound a scarf around her face.

“You can’t be too careful,” he said.

They accelerated out of the narrow lane and onto a major thoroughfare. Soon they were humming along the tree-lined route to the spaceport. Once inside, they took turns sitting with Spikey, the muzzle of a blaster pressed to her ribs, while they got changed into the First Order uniforms they’d been wearing months ago when they defected with her. Spikey’s eyes widened at the sight. Fariol was still officially neutral towards the First Order, but genuine First Order officers were a rare sight.

Morse stroked his hands over his belly. “Doesn’t fit right.”

“Must’a shrunk,” said Sorgen. “Must be the air here. Mine doesn’t fit either.”

“This is how you repay my great cooking,” said Spikey savagely from her spot on a bench where they’d dumped her with orders not to move. 

“Come along,” said Morse, moving in closer so she could feel the muzzle of his blaster under his bag.

They threaded their way through the crowds in the main concourse and out onto a portion of the spacefield that had mainly military and diplomatic ships. Their destination was a small military transport emblazoned with the First Order insignia. Spikey felt her legs grow weak. What reason did Morse and his men have to be loyal to her, after all? They’d been in the First Order for many years before she met them, and whatever Kylo had paid them to protect her, Snoke could surely pay more. For all the midday heat radiating off the blackened duracrete, Spikey could feel cold sweat trickling down her back. Her palms were slick with it.

The ship squatted on its small patch of shadow. The door ramp was up. Deepal took out a small comms disc and tapped out a code.

_Yes?_ came a tinny voice from the disc.

“This is Covert Ops. We have a prisoner.”

_We haven’t got instructions about any prisoner,_ said the voice.

“That’s because you don’t work for Covert Ops. It wouldn’t be covert if we told everybody what we were doing, would we?” said Morse in an exaggeratedly patient voice.

There was the small whine of an external camera droid that unclamped itself from the hull and sidled around to look at them. Morse held up some form of identity card. Then the entrance hatch started to open. 

Spikey decided it was now or never. She dropped straight down out of Morse’s grasp, pulling him off-balance by the knees as she went down. He hit her on the head with the butt of the blaster. She staggered to her feet. A pair of hands was circling her waist to pick her up, and she lashed out in all directions with her feet and fists. She was still windmilling desperately as the men carried her up the ramp and into the ship.

They were met by an excited-looking man in a pilot’s uniform. He gave Morse a snappy salute, obviously trying not to stare at Spikey. She was slung between Deepal and Sorgen, and they both had their hands full trying to hold her. 

“Just you on board, is it?” asked Morse. 

“Yes, sir!”

Morse stepped forward, swung him round and kicked him down the ramp in one quick move, hitting the “close” button on the ship’s hatch as he did so. Spikey stopped struggling and stared, open-mouthed.

“Now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s get moving,” said Morse. “Spikey, have you got anywhere you’d like to go?”

“Back home, you filthy bastard!”

“Apart from home. Tell you what, we’ll tie you to a chair and you can have a think about it while we get into orbit.” 

“Hurry up, that guy out there’s plenty mad. And he’s got a communicator,” called Sorgen from somewhere up ahead. He must have been in the pilot’s seat already. The engines gave a short shudder and worked up to a low scream.

It was a struggle to get Spikey tied to anything at all while the transport was dodging around the other traffic on the way up to orbit. Sorgen found a medkit and stuck a tranquilliser in her to quiet her down.

When she could focus on things again, Fariol was below them in a tapestry of gold and blue and green. The nightside sparkled with cities, beautiful jewels each one. She looked hungrily through the front viewscreen, wondering if she’d ever see it all again. She scratched at her bindings.

“Give it up, Spikey. We’ve got our orders,” said Morse, tired of pointing a blaster at her.

“I’d rather _die_ than fall into Snoke’s hands!” she spat.

“Snoke? Did you think we were taking you to Snoke? Hah, no wonder you were panicking,” said Deepal unsympathetically.

“Well _yeah!_ Imagine the bribes _he_ could pay you,” she snarled. 

“We’re not taking you to Snoke,” said all three men at once. 

_“Kylo’s_ orders, I told you! already,” said Morse, by way of explanation. “So stop it. Behave. We’re not taking you back. It’s not safe.”

Spikey thought of the chitarra, stuffed into one of their bags. They’d hardly bother taking that if she was going to be a victim. Snoke was unlikely to want a concert.

“Okay. I’ll stop fighting,” she muttered. Morse put the blaster away.

“Why couldn’t you just have _said?_ Why did we have to have this big _struggle?_ she asked, exasperated.

“We did. You just weren’t listening. Plus Deepal was spoiling for a fight.”

“Is this still about the toilet rolls, Deepal? You still mad about that?”

“No, he just enjoys fighting,” said Sorgen from the pilot’s seat.

Deepal limped in, a bacta patch on his ankle. “You should brush your teeth more, Spikey. They’re just verminous. The bacta patch nearly died.”

“You guys don’t even care, do you? It means nothing to you that we just belted the shit out of each other?” 

“We’re career military,” said Morse with a lopsided grin. 

“I guess that makes me one of the boys then. Now I know to punch your face any time, if that’s how you prefer to communicate.”

“No hard feelings,” said Sorgen. “Let’s find out where Kylo is. Who’s got the hypercomm?”

“I thought you had it,” said Deepal.

“What? No. I told you to grab it from the house as we were leaving…” 

“You fucking what? You did not!” 

The men looked at each other for a tense moment. Morse turned to Deepal.

“Do you know the codes to get through to Kylo’s ship?”

“Not from memory! And he wouldn’t answer anyway if it’s not encrypted on our key.”

A long silence.

“Can we spot his ship when it arrives?” asked Spikey.

“Probably, but there’s a whole lot of First Order ships going to come after us first. We stole their ship, remember?” said Sorgen. “Of course, he might have it stealthed. Let me see…” 

He was about to say more, but something caught his attention on the earpiece he was wearing. He reached forward to turn it onto the cabin speakers. It was a newscast. 

_The Montjau opera house was destroyed this afternoon 400 Montjau Time in a terrorist attack that has claimed at least 150 lives. The attack, which came during a rehearsal, was carried out by super battle droids shipped in by a transporter with First Order markings. Neither they nor anyone other group has claimed responsibility for the attack…_

Spikey listened silently, trying to take it all in. Nobody said anything for a long time.

Sorgen, staring at his screens, was the first to break the silence. “There’s a lot of ships launching suddenly.”

“Fariol’s just been attacked by the First Order, and we’re in a First Order ship,” said Morse.

“Wait til they find out that the only person not at the opera house this afternoon who was supposed to be is Ms Alias McFake-Identity,” said Spikey. She started to shake.

“Where do you want to go, Spikey?” said Morse at last.

“Untie me,” she said in a small voice.

“Oh yeah. Right. Sorry about that. If you hadn’t been so pig-headed…” He unlocked the bands holding her. She sat, rubbing her wrists and thinking. Her understudy would have been so thrilled to have been given the chance to take the lead. She imagined her wriggling into Spikey’s costume, giddy with excitement. Spikey gulped. Her, and another 149 people she knew. Spikey didn’t want to begin with that. It was all too much.

“Let’s go to D’Qar,” she said at last.

“What’s on D’Qar?” asked Sorgen, reaching for the navcomputer. “Apart from the Resistance?”

“Kylo’s family,” said Spikey.

“I didn’t know that! His family’s in the Resistance? Hah, you learn a new thing every day!”

And we’re going there in a First Order ship,” said Morse. “That’ll be extra-interesting!”  
“What about Kylo?”   
“He can probably use the Force to find us or something,” said Sorgen, punching in coordinates.

The ship tilted up towards the stars and gained speed until with a sudden flash of blue they were in hyperspace. Spikey put her head in her hands and sobbed.


	23. Rey and Snoke 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What could Snoke want that he doesn't have already?
> 
> * * *

The Knights of Ren had names, and Ben could have told them to me. I didn’t want to know, and made up my own names. Stupid Hat. Manky Cloak. Fly Eyes. Studs. They didn’t seem to have personalities anyway, so why bother getting to know them? I didn’t think it was my lack of Force abilities that made them seem so insect-like. Perhaps Snoke had made them more stupid.

They couldn’t afford to hurt me the way they wanted to. I might be their queen one day, after all. Or even their goddess. If they got a bit carried away I’d remind them of that.

“Don’t get handy with me,” I’d say. “Or I’ll remember it when I rule you.”

They’d hiss at me, trying to get the daily dose of drugs into me.

“Or do you doubt your master’s methods will work?” I’d say. “If he can’t turn me to his side, how much longer are you prepared to follow him? Is this the life you dreamt of, stuck here all by yourselves?”

Sometimes I fought them, sometimes I didn’t. I liked to keep them guessing. On the other hand, too much fighting and they would raise the dosage. 

Days passed, or so I thought. I marked my cell each time I woke. One day the Knights took me from my cell and led me to another room. The light was brighter, the walls more translucent, so I seemed to float in a lighted crystal. There was only one thing in the room: a bath of white marble, filled with hot water. Flower petals floated on it and lay scattered on the floor, releasing an intoxicating scent of sweetness and life.

“The Supreme Leader wants to see you. Clean yourself up,” grunted one of the Knights. Another one, Fly Eyes, came in and put a plate of bread and a cup of some warm sweet drink on the rim of the bath. Stupid Hat dropped a folded robe of royal blue onto the floor beside it.

“Your Majesty,” said Fly Eyes, his voice distorted by his helmet. Difficult to tell if he was being sarcastic. The Knights left in a bloc, shutting the translucent door behind them. I could see their darkness wavering and disappearing into the half-light of the walls beyond walls.

When I was sure they were gone, I ate and drank before getting into the bath.

The warm water felt unbelievably good, and I floated for a while in a glowing, scented dream, feeling my hair relax and spread about me like a cloak. So much pleasure was disorientating and I had no doubt that was Snoke’s intention. I got out, and puffs of warm air from the ceiling dried me.

The flight suit I’d been wearing for weeks was in an unspeakable state. I couldn’t make myself get into it again. I held up the royal blue robe. The heavy satin slipped over me like a caress.

A shadow moved beyond the walls, and the door opened. Unsurprisingly Snoke, standing with his hands clasped together and looking pleased.

“Ah, that’s what I like to see,” he said, and I had a sudden glimpse into his mind, where he moved people and planets like pieces. Like we were part of some virtual reality game to him. His doll was dressed, and he was happy.

“There, doesn’t that feel better? This is a bit more like what you deserve? It suits you very well…” he went on. He held out his hand to escort me out. I checked myself. From experience, I could tell that I was too drugged to offer much resistance either in the Force or physically. I could still bite him, I thought…

“Don’t be a child. Come. You will be a queen,” he said, and pulled his own robes about himself as though he hadn’t meant to offer me his arm. 

“If I wanted to wear silk robes I could sell the Falcon and buy them myself,” I said. “And I haven’t, so what does that tell you?”

“It tells me that you lack imagination,” said Snoke, throwing a mildly amused look back over his shoulder at me. “But I intend to show you…”

“You could have done that first, without all the torture and starvation.”

He sniffed. “I find you short-lives don’t pay enough attention unless I shake you up first.”

He led me through darker corridors of rough rock which opened out into another chamber, this one of polished stone. Benched seats rose up one side, and there was a throne on a plinth facing a stone table with vases of flowers and a sunburst pattern carved onto its base. The same sunburst pattern decorated the frame of a huge doorway of black stone on the other side. Golden rays were traced into both halves of the door. 

Snoke gestured me to follow him to the door. He put the palm of one long-fingered hand on it, and asked me to do the same. I inspected it closely first. There didn’t seem to be any mark or mechanism that would be triggered by my touch, so I gingerly laid my hand on the other leaf of the door. At once the humming pulse of power that permeated the whole place grew stronger, and I could feel it throbbing through my palm.

“Do you want to see what’s on the other side?” asked Snoke, eyes sparkling. Daring me.

“No.”

Smiling craftily, he leaned on his half of the door. Little by little it opened. Light poured out, and the air began to shiver with a power. I refused to look. 

He pushed the door all the way open, grabbed me by the shoulders and forced me around to see what was on the other side. Instinctively I struggled, but my limbs were still watery from Snoke’s drugs.

“Look!” he hissed. “Open your eyes!” 

And he unlidded my eyes, with the Force that he could touch and I couldn’t.

In front of me was a dazzling chamber that seemed carved out of diamond. Light reflected everywhere, and not only light but power, power of every kind. The Force too. Even through my dulled senses I could feel it throbbing, insanely magnified. Every surface seemed scoured to a high polish by it. I stared, unable to look away and unable to understand what I was seeing.

Snoke bent down to instruct me, murmuring in my ear.

“The Force and the physical world barely overlap. Only in living things do the two connect. Living things are the thread that ties the Force to our Galaxy. But not reliably, not predictably. Except here. This is the physical place where the Force manifests and feeds on the power of the Galaxy itself.”

He paused as though waiting for my applause. When I said nothing, he went on.

“I made this MYSELF!”

The room seemed to suck at me. Over the stone threshold of the door, it was difficult to tell whether there was a floor or whether I would simply float in light until it consumed me. Something glittered in the centre of the room. Another throne. Two thrones. I couldn’t tell.

“What do you think would happen if you went in there?” said Snoke in a honeyed voice. 

I tried to speak but my lips were too numb to form words. A trickle of sweat ran down my back, although it was not warm. All I could do was slide my eyes sideways to look at Snoke. He smiled back kindly.

“All that power would go into you. Enough power to do ANYTHING!” He seemed to lose control of his voice, ending on a screech.

“So why wouldn’t I take all that power and rule _you?”_ I asked, finding my tongue at last.

Snoke laughed. Really laughed, I mean. Delighted that I was playing along so well.

“I knew you’d ask. But really. Really? What do you think it would do to you?

I must have looked bewildered. He gave me a pitying look that made me want to strangle him.

“I can control it. You can’t. I have spent centuries learning how to control it. Meditating on it, shaping it to my needs. You, it would simply eat you up. You would become a nothing. A power with no purpose, no will. Which is basically what the Force is, most of the time. 

“Whereas I….what do you think I do all day? I have spent centuries meditating on this to master it. To master myself.”

He made a scattering gesture with one hand. Symbols and numbers fell in curtains about us, written in light upon the air around us. Equations. Thousands of them, sparkling and fading.

“Since you can control it, why don’t you walk in there and take it for yourself?” I asked.

“I’m not the conduit. You are,” he said flatly, and I caught a whiff of his thoughts. He’d been pruning Force-users to suit his needs for centuries. Kylo and I were the result.

I looked at the glowing room. The light pulsed, and the low hum pulsed, and my heart struggled to pull free of its enslaving rhythm.

“I could still go in there, and I’d come out of it stronger than you,” I said. Not as firmly as I wanted to.

“Maybe you could,” said Snoke. He was stroking his chin and watching me narrowly, a small smile still on his face. “And then no doubt you would be immortal too. Immortal, with no mind, and without ever having lived. All the things you’ve never experienced. You, a young girl, who still gets excited about dessert! 

“Think of what you’d be giving up. All the kisses you’ll never have. You’ll never make a child. And whatever you think the your Force-bond is with Kylo, you’ll never know love.”

He leaned in close, almost breathing on me so I felt my gorge rise.

“I have done all those things. A thousand times. I was already old when I came to your Galaxy. And here I discovered the Force. I found I could live until I was bored of it, and beyond that. Live until I tired of things being the way they are. I have experienced everything. Things you can’t imagine. And I’ve had enough of everything the way it is.”

“You want to become a god,” I said flatly. He looked a little surprised I’d caught on right away. He didn’t know I’d guessed it months ago.

“I AM becoming a god!” He looked at me brightly, as though sure I would be happy for his good fortune. “I want to make things better,” he said, more reasonably. “And I’m ready to step beyond the sensual world that living things inhabit. I’ve done it all already. So, yes. I want to become a god.”

He walked around me, tweaked my robe so the satin fell more gracefully. He stood back to admire the effect.

“So. How are gods made, you’re wondering,” he said.

“I already know. They need belief,” I said. Thinking of R2D2 and BB8, and their strange, illogical loyalty to us. We made them, we were as gods to them.

“Clever girl,” he said dryly. “And I can’t tell you how pleased I am about that. A great god does not desire the worship of fools.”

He was already in his fantasy world, I thought. Insane. But he was going to drag me with him, wherever his madness led him.

“So here is how it works,” he said, gazing at me intently. “I need believers. I have worked over the centuries to make the Force sentient, and now it nearly is. Sentient enough to believe in something. You are the conduit. Through you, the Force will understand what belief is, and it will believe in me.”

“There’s a problem with that. I’d have to believe in you first.” 

“Oh, I’ll make it worth your while. Imagine if I had the power to fold back time…and I will. To punch through the walls of yesterday and undo what was done.”

I thought I could see where this was leading, and I wasn’t wrong.

“How often have you wanted to reach back into the past, to tear away the barrier that holds you back from your family, from the love and the belonging you can sense but never touch? The life you can never remember. Imagine smoothing it all away, changing the course of it so you’re safe, surrounded by them. So you will always have been theirs, until you’re ready to come to me.”

“Why would I come to you?”

“Because I’ll be a god. That will be the way it has to happen. You can’t do it, but I can. I’ve studied the secrets of time.” 

“What about Ben?” I said, using his given name to be annoying. What had Snoke planned on doing with him, anyway?

“Ah, there’s an error I regret. He was the wrong one, and I took the wrong path in trying to shape him to my needs. He would worship me, but this room would break him. He is cracked already. I could undo all of that, and give him a happy childhood with his family too. No need then for the attack on the Jedi school that destroyed your memories.”

He gave me a pleased look. “See how it all fits together? And then you’d come to me, whole and unbroken, and give me the Force’s allegiance gently, as a gift.”

“‘Dear god, giver of all good things, accept my humble gratitude, that we may continue to live in blessedness’….that kind of thing?”

“Exactly. Once I’d given you your heart’s desire, what else could you do but worship me?”

“That’s completely backwards,” I said. “You can’t do it unless I get the Force to worship you first, right?”

“Think of it as priming the pump. Time isn’t as linear as you experience it. Give me your allegiance now, and I’ll create your worship in the past, which will cast its power into the present.” He illustrated his meaning with a gesture as though sprinkling goodness and bounty around our heads. I found it irritating as well as sick.

‘Understand, girl. The Force is powerful, but forgive me if I say it is also stupid. The Force feels things, it can blindly grope towards a plan, a balance….” he said.

“Like an ecosystem,” I said, thinking aloud. Snoke’s look of pleasure made me wish I’d kept my mouth shut.

“Yes. It runs on emotion. I can give it intelligence. Think of us as a ship. You are the hyperdrive, unimaginably powerful. But without the framework of an engine and a guidance system around you, you’re nothing more than a reactor core meltdown and a hole in space. If we want to go anywhere, we have to do it TOGETHER!”

Again, that unpredictable roar seized his voice. 

_“And when you’re ready, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll go in together. You to harvest the Force and feed it to me, and me to control it while I protect you!”_

I found I could shut my eyes, and I did so. 

“Ah, it’s all a bit much to take in, isn’t it?” he said, voice under control again. He took me by the elbow and led me back into the stone throne room, leaving me in front of the table with the flowers on it. Where did he find flowers? I wondered.

He sat down on the throne in front of me. 

“Light the candles there by the vases, please. Perhaps simplest if you just start with some chanting. Shape it around a prayer. Pray for what you want.”

“No!”

“Imagine your mother, smoothing back your hair, teaching you how to put it up in those charming buns.”

“No!”

“I wonder what your favourite food was when you were little. You could taste it again…”

“No! Where are my parents, anyway?”

“Dead. They died in a reactor fire two years ago. They never knew what became of you, and it tormented them every day of their lives,” said Snoke, all pretence gone. I stared at him, tears betraying me.

“You could fix it,” he whispered. “Pray I return them to you.”


	24. Spikey on D'Qar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spikey makes it to D'Qar. Leia wants news of her son.
> 
>  
> 
> * * *

“This thing is no pod-racer,” said Sorgen with disgust, sitting in the pilot’s seat. “But we’re almost there. A couple of hours.” His feet were propped on the viewscreen, and blue light flashed past his them; the same view they’d had for days.

“What’s the hurry? We’re going to pop out in front of a Resistance cruiser’s targeting field,” said Morse. “Last meal, anyone? Spikey?”

He pulled a coat off one of the bench seats at the back of the cabin, revealing Spikey on the floor underneath. She’d created a sort of lair of misery under the seats and had stayed there since they’d left Fariol. They’d given her a pillow and left her to it. She had too many people to mourn.

Morse offered her a hand. “Come on. Up. Make a good first impression.”

To his surprise, Spikey rolled out from under the seats and accepted his help getting to her feet. She looked pale, red-eyed and gloomy. 

She gave him a thumbs-up and shuffled off silently to the transport’s refresher. Deepal dug around in a bag and found some fresh clothes, which he threw at her over the refresher’s miserable half-door. 

“I’m her karkin’ nursemaid now,” he grumbled. 

“You can complain to Kylo some day. Plus, remember she looked after you when you had that fever,” said Morse.

Spikey came out looking and smelling rather better. She sat down behind Sorgen, who handed back a bag of protein flakes. She looked at the plain black and white packaging for a moment before rummaging around for a handful. 

“At least the packaging doesn’t lie,” she said, talking around a tasteless mouthful. 

“It speaks!” said Sorgen in mock-wonder, grinning over his shoulder at Spikey. “Speaking of speaking, who wants to talk to the Resistance? Morse, you better sit in the comms seat.”

Morse gave Spikey a keen look as he swung past her into the comms station, trying to gauge her mood. “What’ll I tell them? ‘General Organa, would you like to meet the girl who shagged your son?’”

“Ooh! Popular! Why not tell them she’s pregnant?” said Deepal, sniggering.

“Why not just fly into the sun and be done with it?” said Spikey bitterly, but she was laughing too. “Anyway, where would that leave us? We’d have to find a baby somewhere.”

“Shut up, comedians. We’re out of hyperspace in three — two — one” said Sorgen. The strobing blue stars flickered and bloomed into realspace, a field of white flowers. D’Qar was a green-speckled blue ball shining beneath them.

Five seconds later the comms and fire panels lit up with red lights and at least three warning buzzers sounded on clashing pitches. Spikey covered her ears.

A voice came over the comms, its clipped Galactic Hub accent a contrast to the lilting Fariol voices to which they’d become accustomed.

 _“First Order ship. You are in Resistance-controlled space under the aegis of the New Republic. This is the frigate_ No Pasarán. _“Stand down your weapons and prepare to be escorted into a landing bay.”_

“Weapons stood down. May I state for the record that this is a stolen First Order ship?” said Morse, sounding calm. Like the others, he was no longer wearing his uniform.

_“So noted. State your business.”_

“We are former First Order officers, escaping from the First Order. We have a passenger with connections to General Organa.”

“Shagged! Her! Son!” mouthed Deepal, who’d sat down next to Spikey. She bared her teeth and swatted him.

“The imaging camera’s on,” said Sorgen. Deepal and Spikey straightened up and tried to look serious. 

The sun caught two streaks of light: x-wings swooping in for escort duty. They took station on either side, and a moment later Sorgen received the coordinates for the _No Pasarán._ Long minutes passed silently as they followed the x-wings until they could see the faint lights of the frigate against the blackness of space. There was the soft “whoom” of the tractor beam locking on to their ship, drawing them towards the brightly-lit open mouth of a landing bay. Spikey saw the glowering mouths of the ship’s cannons as they passed, and she shuddered.

The x-wings waggled their wings in salute or derision — it was hard to tell — and shot off to do other business. Sorgen shut down their ship’s engines, letting the tractor beam bring them in. A double row of gaudily-armoured soldiers lined up to welcome them, weapons at the ready.

“Yay. New home,” said Spikey. She looked at Deepal and the other men, envying their stolid military bearing. Well, they’d survived working directly under Kylo Ren, of course they weren’t the type to panic. She’d even heard them brag about how long they could survive being Force-choked.

“Travel the Galaxy, make new friends,” said Deepal, and flashed her a quick smile.

“Let’s hope they like us,” she said.

* *

Leia had been contacted by one of the officers of the No Pasarán, and what she’d heard was intriguing enough that she followed Finn to the small room in the main block where new arrivals were processed. Two soldiers stood guarding the door. Inside, sitting on a row of plain chairs, were the crew of the small First Order ship that had arrived at D’Qar that day. 

Finn introduced himself while Leia hung back to observe.

“I’m Captain Finn Stormbringer. You may know me as FN-2187.” 

Leia watched the three men react to the name whose example had set hundreds of stormtroopers rising up in revolt. They nodded, faces giving nothing away. Definitely military, she thought. Tense, watchful, but not hostile, she decided.

The girl though. She sat curled in a ball, a little to one side, clearly very anxious. Her eyes darted between Finn and Leia. A small woman with a recently shaven head.

The men had given their names, and now they gave their reason for defecting from the First Order.

“We were ordered to protect this woman,” said Morse, the man who seemed to be in charge of the trio. “Ordered by Kylo Ren, who we were following when we defected from the First Order.”

“Ben,” said Leia automatically, and then did a double take. “YOU’RE Spikey?” 

The girl was turning red. “Yes,” she mumbled. Leia had a brief vision of all the beautiful young women Ben might have brought to her, blushing, hanging on his arm. Tall willowy daughters of the great houses of the Galaxy. Not this little brown sparrow. But now Spikey was looking at Leia with a bird’s bright eyes, asking, “You’re General Organa?”

Leia nodded, and the girl went on. “Your son is well, I think. Free of Snoke, and free to roam the Galaxy in his own ship.”

Leia could read what she didn’t say but only thought: _He is tall and beautiful and dangerous and magnificent._

“When did you see him last?” asked Leia, her heart beating too hard.

“A couple of days before I left Fariol. He warned me Snoke was after me, and then there was an attempt on my life. Everyone’s lives, really. The First Order blew up a building I was meant to be in. I got away, but we can’t contact Kylo now.”

The girl was sizing Leia up now, staring with frank curiosity. Leia felt uncharacteristically old: round-shouldered and a little dowdy. Trying to stifle her jealousy of this girl who knew her son and knew the man he had grown into. It was unfair.

“Finn, take the men away for debriefing somewhere else. I want to talk to Spikey alone.”

The men gave Spikey the side-eye as they left; complicit and amused. Leia could sense their protectiveness towards her, and also how much they would love to be flies on the wall for the conversation to come. 

“Ky—Ben’s worried about Rey. He says Snoke’s got her,” Spikey went on. 

“We know. Is he in contact with her through the….you know about the Force, right?”

Spikey nodded. 

“Yes, I know. They talk to each other even though they’re hiding from each other. But after Snoke took her, Ben said he couldn’t talk to her. He could feel she was alive, but it was like she was unconscious or asleep. Drugged, maybe.”

Leia went over to where Threepio had left a pot of tea on the warmer. She poured two cups and pressed one into Spikey’s hands.

“You look like you need this. Now, tell me how you and Ben met…”

Leia saw something in Spikey relax. She wanted to talk about him. She missed him. There was even a little smile on her face as she began her story. 

Leia sat back to listen, warmed by that smile. For so long she had felt as though she was the only person in the Galaxy to have any hope for her son. Now here was Spikey, against all the odds, with fresh news of him. She’d won kindness from him and perhaps even love. Surely there was hope.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that story would be this, of course!
> 
> archiveofourown.org/works/6261889/chapters/14348407


	25. Rey and Snoke 4: Getting Religion

I began to think Snoke knew what he was doing. Every day he had me chained up before the altar in the stone throne-room with the doors open to the crystal room. I didn’t have to take his word for it to know what would happen if I went in there unprotected: the power pouring through the open doors sucked at me and shredded my mind. Every day became an exercise in endurance to hang onto my self.

Snoke monitored me closely, making sure his drugs were keeping me helpless, cut off from using the Force. It was a delicate game he played: the power of the crystal room would wear down my will to resist him, but too much exposure would destroy the parts of me he needed. 

He seemed unaffected, at least from where he sat on the stone throne facing me. Unless you could blame his essential madness on the power leaking from the crystal room.

One day he came in wearing the horned mask from one of our Niima scavenger rituals, something we’d copied from the Teedos. 

“It must be time for Leadtide back on Jakku,” he said. The Knights of Ren filed in after him, carrying burning brands which they piled up around the altar. They chanted the words familiar from my childhood and shaped little leaden figures which they threw into the fire. Snoke waved his hand, and a chute opened in one of the walls, spilling molten lead to flood the floor with all its heat and fumes. Snoke waded through it unharmed and cleared a path so the Knights could circle the altar, shouting. The lead hung about their feet, shimmering with heat.

“Not going to join in?” he asked. 

I started to lose consciousness with the vapours. With a few waves of his hands, Snoke swept the molten lead and rolled it up into a ball that hung in the air for a moment before he threw it into the crystal room. A finger of blue lightning licked out from one of the walls and consumed it. The Knights staggered around the altar, looking as sick as I felt.

Snoke cupped my face in his hands. “Not good for you, it it? I will heal you.” I rolled my eyes in disbelief.

“Oh yes, I can heal you. Dark side, Light side, it doesn’t matter to me. If it works, I’ll use it,” he whispered. Force flowed from his hands, filling my whole body with the lightness and ease of perfect health. Perfect except for the drugs that still weakened me.

“And see, you are restored.” He stepped back and opened his arms, waiting for me to bow my head in gratitude or amazement. Behind him, the Knights shuffled out, stunned by the lead fumes. The sound of one of them retching into his vocal processor probably saved my sanity. In ordinary circumstances it would have made me laugh until my sides hurt. 

Now I just stood and waited for Snoke to go away, and so he did, for that day.

Another time he came in saying it was Coppermas, and made copper boil in a lake in front of the altar. I thought I remembered having scavenged some copper windings to throw in, but I couldn’t find them in my robes. The Knights prostrated themselves before the altar, chanting. They made ugly black shapes against the purity of the metal, which distressed me. 

But what did I need copper gifts for? I was a queen, after all. The Knights were spoiling the ceremony. I should have their hearts cut out. I saw Snoke’s eyes kindle with greed at the idea. Did I ask for that aloud? I woke much later with blood on my lips, feeling sick. When the Knights came to drug me the next day, I couldn’t remember how many there ought to be.

Snoke looked happy though.

I slept each night in my cell, if you could call it night in that half-lit changeless realm. I’d go to Kylo along the Force-bond. 

_Remind me who I am,_ I’d say. 

_You are Rey. When Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber flew into your hands I wanted to hate you, but I couldn’t. You were magnificent. You were the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. You are still that woman,_ he’d say, pouring strength into me.

I took that strength into the throne room the next day and held on to myself every way I could.

* * *

_My name is Rey, and I’m from Jakku._

_That’s two things I know for sure, so that’s what I say when anybody asks me._

_Of course, nobody’s really from Jakku. It’s not the kind of place people usually live in. Hardly any water, and you can’t grow food. If it weren’t for the war, all of us at Niima Outpost wouldn’t be here._

_But there was a war, a big one, before I was born. One of the big battles was fought above Jakku, and so many starships crashed onto the surface that it’s given us a lifetime of work scavenging for all that valuable technology. And that’s why most people came here. If you’re prepared to work, you never need to go very hungry on Jakku. I’ve heard that people on other planets aren’t as lucky as us._

_So, like everyone else here I came from somewhere else. My people left me here, where I would be safe. One day they’ll come back for me. I guess things aren’t safe out there yet. Meanwhile I say I’m Rey, from Jakku, until I find out where I really come from._

_I’m definitely very lucky that I was left with Unkar Plutt. People laugh when I say that, because he’s so mean. But I’ve thought about this a lot. He’s a hard trader, for sure. That makes him the best merchant on Jakku. Don’t even bother trading with the others. They might offer better prices sometimes, but they can’t keep it up for long. With Unkar, the work is steady._

_He knows more than anyone and he’s taught me a lot about the machines we scavenge. When he’s in a good mood he’ll teach me more too — repair work for instance. I love repairing things. He’s even let me work on his pride and joy, an old Corellian freighter. I don’t know why he likes it so much. It’s vintage._

_When I was a kid, I used to enjoy sitting in the cockpit of it wearing an old Rebel helmet I found and playing that I was really a Rebellion pilot. So maybe Unkar has his own dreams about that freighter._

_People are scared of Unkar Plutt because he’ll get some big guys to rough up anyone who crosses him. I’ve been able to beat them in a fight since I finished growing, because they’re pretty slow. So I don’t worry too much about that. See, a couple of times I did things that annoyed Unkar and he sent them to “teach me a lesson”. I managed to keep ahead of them long enough to prove to Unkar that my way of doing things worked, and that was the end of it. If you keep standing up to them, they give up._

_People complain about the way he changes the prices he pays us. He says it’s because Galactic markets change so quickly. I know he’s lying about that, in a way, but in another way he’s not. He has a commlink to talk to people on Ponemah and Ogem. Sometimes he hears news from them that makes him nervous, and it’s hard for nervous people to be generous. When he’s feeling unhappy about things, he gives you a price we both know isn’t fair. But he can’t help the way he feels about Galactic events. He’s travelled a lot and I guess he has worries about things that the rest of us can’t imagine.  
He is grouchy a lot of the time, but I think he suffers a lot because he’s a Crolute, and every day he spends out of salt water is torture for him. That makes Jakku just about the worst place in the Galaxy for him!_

_I’m very lucky to be a human on Jakku. There aren’t many of us. Fish-people like Unkar Plutt have a terrible time of it, of course, but even Dybrintheans like Athgar Heece, who doesn’t mind the heat, can’t get around without a breather helmet, and a lot of the others are weighed down by a whole load of survival gear. Us humans are light and quick and we stand the heat. I think we’re pretty well adapted for life here._

_I don’t want to sound like I think I’m special for being human. Everyone’s got their strengths and weaknesses, and when you get to know all the different kinds of people that live at Niima Outpost you realise that we’re all just trying to get by in the world, in our different ways. It’s one of the things that makes it so interesting living here. Though some people are just bad to the core; once you understand them you know you should give them no quarter because they won’t give you any._

_* * *_

_Rey! Rey! Stop! What are you becoming?_ said Kylo, along our Force-link. _That was the past! You are not that girl any more. You are a woman. You are the woman I love. See: I see you, truly I do._

I tried to explain how my dreams guarded my soul, the soul I had made myself on Jakku.

* * *  
_It’s not true that Jakku is all desert. At the poles, there is water - oceans of it! But it’s all hidden away under a thick salt crust for most of the year. Twice a year the wind patterns get violent enough to break up the salt, and the heat pulls the water up into the air and over towards us, and it rains. Rain is incredible — one of my favourite things on Jakku. You’d be amazed at the things that burst out of the ground and grow like mad for a couple of weeks every year. The colours almost hurt your eyes! But even more than rain, which I’ve seen every year, I would love to see the great white salt-bergs break up in the polar thaw. Apparently they sparkle, and roar like the biggest engine you ever heard, only different. An old spacer described it to me._

_One day I’ll get there. I’ve got an old land-speeder I built myself. That makes me the luckiest young person on Jakku, for sure. How many other kids get to fly around on something like that at my age? It’s pretty funny-looking but it’s always worked really well for me. One day I’ll save up enough fuel to go on a long, long trip and explore more of Jakku._

_Jakku is really beautiful, though it took me a long time to see that. The sand catches the light in so many colours, changing from all shades of red and orange to the softest gold and brown. Then at midday there’s no colour, exactly, but the sun dances and pulses like the greatest power you can imagine. It takes your breath away. The dunes shift, little by little, and there is no end to the patterns they make. When the sunrise catches the tops of the dunes, it is a sight as beautiful as anything in the Galaxy. I am sure of that._

_Then if you get a sandstorm, you’ll come out of your shelter a few days later and everything’s moved! But it’s just as pretty. Of course, after a sandstorm you generally have to go round fixing a few things that shouldn’t have moved._

_As well as travelling to see the great polar saltberg thaw, there are many wonderful and mysterious things on Jakku that I’d like to visit. Of course I’ve seen the remains of the Empire research station — everyone was in a hurry to scavenge that first, and I’m sure there were fortunes made by the people who got there first. There’s not much left to see now. But there’s also places like Tuanul Village in Kelvin Ravine, where they have a big vaporator cistern. I’d like to see how that works. I’ve heard they have enough water to lie down in! They keep it underground, of course.  
The research station was built because there’s some good topography in hyperspace around here, which has made Jakku important for space travel, even though there has never been much on the surface before that big space battle turned it into such a valuable junkyard. A spacer told me that, too._

_Long before the Empire — before any of the Empires that anyone knows about — some mysterious race built the Beam Line right around the equator. People call it the Beam Line but nobody knows what it’s for. It might be for mapping spacetime, or something to do with the hyperspace anomalies around here. There’s a big installation orbiting the edges of our system that always aligns with the Beam Line. Anyway, what you see now is a line of rings standing on tall poles half buried in the dunes, right around the planet. Nobody’s managed to scavenge those. I’d love to line my speeder up with the centre of those rings and race right around the equator!_

_I’m definitely one of the luckiest people on Jakku. Everyone says I have “the nose” and it’s true, I always seem to find good scrap even in places other scavengers have worked over for years. I just sort of know where there’s something they’ve missed._

_I’ve even managed to find things like a whole hull compartment full of copper windings in time for Coppermas. That was incredibly lucky because we have superstitions about that kind of thing. At Niima Outpost we usually celebrate for a whole ten-day between Coppermas and Leadtide. It was more copper than I knew what to do with. Unkar sold me some extra food treats I could share with the other scavengers, and we had the best feast ever. Even Unkar came out of his bunker to join in that night. I don’t think he went as far as dancing, but he was in the best mood I’ve ever seen him in._

_Teguan and her family are the humans I know best at Niima Outpost. It’s a good thing that when my family left me here, Teguan was here, because she has a huge family so I guess that made up for not having my own. I mean, Unkar Plutt was my guardian but Teguan’s family showed me how to live here. They could often afford to feed me, though they had eight children of their own. Her husband Misrah ran the solar smelter. He was a powerful man around these parts, before he died in the raid that wrecked the smelter. I don’t know how Teguan found time to keep an eye on me when I was little. She’s really old — her face is wrinkled all over— so I don’t think she’d want to look after any more kids now._

_Her children have all left Jakku now and some of them have their own children now. One of them, Lissa, lives in a palace! That proves you don’t have to be a nobody just because you come from Jakku._

_Some of them went offworld to go to school. Apparently at school you can sit all day and learn about things. I didn’t used to think that sitting around was any way to learn things, but since I’ve grown up I run around less and think more. I like to sit outside my AT-AT (did I tell you I live in my own AT-AT? How lucky am I?) and put on my Rebel helmet, and think about things. Maybe that sounds silly but anyway that’s what I like to do._

_I had other friends too. Chindeep was a young Toydarian. We used to play together all the time, exploring some of the nearer wrecks. His family operated boom-fly hives. When you open up an old wreck, sometimes it’s been very well sealed or some kind of stasis field has been in operation, and you still have a lot of dead bodies that are bad to work around and kind of disgusting. Boom-flies go in and eat up all the bodies, and when they’re done, all at once they explode out of the wreck with a big “BOOM!”. It’s an incredible sight. They have these gauzy wings, so you can imagine what they look like, rising into the sky like a great whirling rainbow cloud. The Toydarians have some way of calling them in or herding them back to their travelling hive. And afterwards the ship is completely clean and safe to enter. Chindeep says it’s pretty awful if you have to go in while the boom-flies are still working. He had to do that once or twice. I never went with him._

_When I die I think I’d like to have the boom-flies clean me up. I’d love to end up as a coloured veil against the sky._

_Chindeep and I used to climb around on things, and of course he could fly. I used to jump up and fly with him sometimes. Or it was more like I was doing super-long jumps. Say if you had to leap from one stanchion to another in a ship’s hold, I’d do that. At least, I remember I did. It was something that just happened. We didn’t tell anyone about it. Then later when we did tell people, nobody believed us. Maybe I’m remembering it wrong. It seems like it really did happen. I haven’t done it in a long time, so maybe it’s not true that I flew like that._

_Sometimes on those old hulks you’ll be in the crew quarters and there are pictures and holocubes that show you other places and other people. You can learn a lot about people by the things left behind in their cabins. It’s almost like having friends._

* * *

I woke out of my daze and this time it was Snoke beside me. 

“See what you are becoming? You are pushing back the barriers of time already. Make me a god and I will throw them down completely and you can be that girl again. Only this time you won’t grow up alone on Jakku!”

Days in the throne room seemed endless. I thought of every living thing I knew, recalling the map in the Jedi temple with its record of life proliferating through the Galaxy. The single-celled ones first, and then all the green ones that learned to harvest sunlight, and then on and on through all of recorded history until I had the architecture of life clear in my mind, that web that spanned the stars. It kept my mind busy and it comforted me.

“Very good, but we don’t need to remake all living things from the beginning,” said Snoke mildly when I came to my senses. “Just remove some of the unpleasant ones and make the rest a bit… _nicer,_ shall we say?”

“I didn’t _do_ anything! I was just thinking to pass the time!” I said.

“Are you sure?” said Snoke, smiling his cracked smile.

I wasn’t sure.

Alone in my cell again, I rushed to Kylo, desperate. 

_Is everything the same? I didn’t change anything did I?_

_No, everything is exactly the same, and I love you,_ he said.

I panicked then. _Snoke suggested I make everything and everyone nicer. Maybe he’s been stealing my power already to do it! He’s such a liar, how would I know?_

 _He must have missed doing me, then,_ said Kylo ruefully. 

_Then how come you’re being so good to me?_

_Because I love you. That doesn’t make me a good person. I am still the man who killed all those people in Tuanul village, for no good reason._

_You what?_

_Spikey was right. Let’s not have any lies between us,_ he said, and told me about the massacre in Tuanul village. I didn’t have much to say about it afterwards. I mean, here we were, in this together somehow, and he was my only hope.

 _I think I ate somebody’s heart. One of the Knights of Ren. But I can’t tell if I did or not,_ I said after a while.

I fell and I fell. 

_I dreamed of catching you, when you were little, and ever since,_ he said. _You wouldn’t let me, in real life. In my dreams I caught you, and they were my best dreams._

 _Catch me now,_ I said. And he did, over and over again, reaching for me along the Force-bond that was all I had left.

Until the day when I thought I was safe in his imaginary arms, tucked under his heart far away in Fariol, and _something_ grabbed me and began to tear my soul out of my body and out of his. I made a screaming, flailing retreat into normal consciousness and found Snoke holding my head, his long, long fingers wrapping easily right around my skull.

“So that’s where you’ve been going. I did wonder how you resisted me so long. Tell me, how is my old friend Kylo Ren?”

I could feel Kylo’s watchful presence within me, shaking with anger. He wanted to be where I was, face to face with Snoke. I wished he could lend me his physical strength along the Force-bond. We’d tried it before, and he couldn’t. I raised my fists in case anything had changed, but halfway up to Snoke’s face they drooped onto my lap again.

Snoke sat back, looking like a giant spider gangling on the floor of the cell next to me. He was tall enough to look down on me even so.

“There’s a lot I didn’t know about the Force-bond,” he said. “Including the fact that apparently it remains even when I’ve cut all your access to the Force down to a trickle.”

“But I have learned something interesting,” he said, smiling down at me. “If you’re not in your body, that leaves room for me. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

I looked at him blankly. Kylo was just about exploding behind my forehead, wanting to kill Snoke.

“How would you like to go and live in Kylo’s body, and I’ll take yours. _I_ can use it to stroll into that crystal room. All your Force powers joined to my intelligence and knowledge. I have enough belief in myself, and the Force will bow to me!”

“You can’t do that!”

“How would you know?” he said nastily. “If you leave your body again, I’ll try it. If we do it this way, I warn you I won’t be a merciful god. Towards you and Kylo, anyway.”

“I didn’t leave my body!”

“There wasn’t enough of you in there just now to keep me out. Try it again and we’ll find out what I’m capable of, shall we?”

He grabbed my head again suddenly and held himself inches away from my face, looking in through my eyes . “As for you, Kylo, I know you’re there.” He started pouring the Force into me, trying to grab hold of Kylo’s mind through me. So much pain ripped through me that I spun into unconsciousness with my own screams tearing my throat to shreds.

When I came to, Snoke was still there. “If he tries to come back, I’ll really kill him,” he said smugly. “Now I know what he’s doing, it’ll be easy. I’ve grown fond of you, Rey, and I don’t enjoy using pain on you. But I haven’t lived this long only to give in to squeamishness. I will hurt you, if you don’t do as I say.”   
He sat next to me in the unchanging half-light, staring at me. I just lay there, every nerve still throbbing with the aftermath of pain.

“Nobody knows where you are, Rey. Nobody’s coming to save you.”


	26. Searching for the Fallen ones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finn would be happy if he never saw Kylo again. Still, an order is an order, and he owes Leia all his loyalty. Meanwhile Kylo is trying to protect Rey from Snoke's infectious madness.
> 
> * * *

Sleep was evading Leia these days. Bored by her insomnia, she made one of her trips to the base’s medcentre. Finn was in there again.

She found him just as the first light of dawn was striping the grey sky with dim bars of orange. He seemed to be sleeping badly, thrashing among the drips and bacta-patches that were helping him heal.

“Still with me, Slip?” he muttered, and reached out. “Oh no! Oh no! Slip!!!” Finn rolled sideways, punched his pillow and woke up. He took a gulp from the glass beside his bed.

“Nightmare?” asked Leia, although it was obvious. Finn squinted through the darkness of the room towards her and gave a start when he saw her, spilling his water.

“General?” Embarrassed, Finn tried to dry the water he’d snorted onto his bedside table with a corner of his pillow.

“I couldn’t sleep either,” she said. “You know I come here if I’m awake early.” Her eyes rested on him.

“I know. You did it before. It’s one reason I stayed to fight for you. Captain Phasma never cared to look on the wounded afterwards.”

“Well, that’s good,” said Leia. “We’re very lucky you came to us. I can never thank you enough. But seriously….you have to stop getting yourself hurt like this!”

Finn laughed in his pleasant baritone, his voice going up into a surprising squeak. It was endearing, like so many things about him.

“My troops have to stop getting themselves in these situations, General!”

“What was it this time?” Leia asked, though she’d heard the reports.

“Oh, we were running through fire with our breathing gear. Somebody got a leak in his oxygen line. Oxygen and fire, not a good mix! It looked like everything was going to go up in flames, and we’d never be able to reach the ship’s drive core, which we needed to fix or we’d never leave.”

“You risked your life didn’t you?” asked Leia.

“We had to get to him and clamp his oxygen lines or he would have gone up like a torch. I have a recurring dream about that, something that happened in training. Slip. He dies that way, in my dreams. I couldn’t stand seeing it in real life.”

“I can imagine,” said Leia. “Still, I might just have to give you a medal or something.”

“Aw, you think? Once I started moving in the right direction, the others followed me,” said Finn. “I wasn’t the only one being a hero that day. People took a lot of risks to get that fire out.” He paused a moment, then asked, “Any news from Rey?”

“Nothing new.” Leia smiled tiredly. “I know you’re fond of her. I have to ask you a difficult question, though.”

FInn nodded, and she went on.

“What do you think about the Force-bond between Rey and Ben?”

Finn flopped his head back on the pillow and breathed out in a huff.

“Phew. That’s a hard one. It makes me kind of sick, to be honest. I mean, she’s tough, but she doesn’t know much about some things. I’m afraid he’s just.… you know. He’s seen something he wants, and he has to have it.”

“He likes her too, you know,” said Leia cautiously. “Even if he’s too much of a fool to know what to do about it.”

“Did Rey tell you that?” asked Finn quickly.

“Not in so many words. It made her too uncomfortable to admit it. Especially since she’s friends with you.”

Finn’s face became wooden. “On that last mission to Mezzala, Rey and I were together a lot. I could tell Ben and her talked through the Force. She’d get a distracted look. But not scared. She can stand up to him, I think.” Finn paused for a long time, and Leia could tell his next words cost him dearly. “Yeah, I think he must like her. A lot. Who wouldn’t love Rey?”

Leia nodded, seeing the pain in his eyes. But all she said was, “She brings out the good in people, Finn. She’s got that power. I think now Ben’s left the First Order, he’d help us rescue Rey. If we can find him.”

“You son does not like me one bit,” said Finn, and Leia knew their fight in the snow had been more than the conflict between two soldiers fighting on opposite sides. Finn, of all people, didn’t usually take combat so personally.

“I know this is going to be difficult. But if we want to rescue Rey, Ben’s Force powers might be our only hope. You don’t like him, but I need you to put that aside.”

Finn’s voice when he replied was less animated. “Whatever you say, General.”

“I do say, Finn. You’ve faced him before. I want you to lead a team to search for him. Spikey says he was headed for Fariol. Start there.”

* * *

**Fariol**

Montjau suffered the rains of winter, everything shuttered, the days short and dark. Kylo suffered too, curled in his air-shaft eyrie like a bird of prey in moult. Most mornings he sought out the warmth of the cafe and sat for hours, speaking to no one. Unless he felt Rey calling for him, fainting along the Force-bond, needing his strength. Then he didn’t move from his hiding place at all.

“You stink,” said the cafe owner’s son. Kylo skewered him with a black look, but the boy was used to his moods. “You can’t keep sitting there like that. It’s driving customers away.”

Kylo got up and went out into the rain. The boy ran after, saying “You can use our refresher. That’s all I meant!”

Kylo ignored him. There was a dry a spot out of the wind under the wide stone porch of the local House of Justice. He sat, wrapped in his cloak, and somebody dropped a coin by his wet fraying boots. Kylo didn’t bother looking at the giver. He scooped up the coin. Sustaining the Force-bond took something out of him. He’d need to eat more, if he wanted to keep supporting Rey.

Kylo had left the worst of his ghosts back on the ship, which was one reason he didn’t return there. The crying Twilek child hadn’t troubled him again. But on dim days like this, new ghosts seemed to form out of the shadows. Grain sacks piled in a courtyard became bodies, dismembered and cauterised by blasters. People running from the rain became civilians dodging sniper fire. Elongated reflections on the rainswept streets turned ordinary pedestrians into stalking monsters. The illusions would vanish if he looked at them, only to return once his attention wandered.

His conversations with Rey made his heart ache. She seemed to be losing her grip on reality too, with all that Snoke was putting her through. He wondered if he also bore some blame for that. How could Rey stay sane, relying on him when he seemed to be losing his mind?

He had to stay strong for her, and when she linked to him he felt he was at his strongest: single-minded in his intentions, convinced that he could save her. The rest of the time, he was full of doubts. So he lived, feeding her his strength, holding himself open to her needs. Nothing else mattered.

For a while he hoped that the Knights of Ren might prove a weak point. But the Knights seemed to have fallen from what they had been when he knew them. Snoke was working them down to nothing.

_They work in shifts_ , Rey said. _They use the Force to watch me and I think they watch space around where we are too, looking for intruders._

_Can you trick them? Turn them against each other?_

If Rey could find out where she was being held, then he could rescue her, he thought. He was sure the purity of his anger would be enough to destroy any opposition.

_They hardly seem to have any minds left,_ said Rey. _They’re like living droids with the Force. I can’t use the Force enough to read anything more than that from them._

Far away, Kylo felt her start up a repetitive chant. A mantra to protect her from the bad forces around her, she said. She didn’t want to end up like them.

_Stop it! It’s a religious thing! Snoke’s getting to you!_

She stopped and he felt her shock. Again that sensation: she was falling, falling along their link, and he caught her.

_Next thing I’ll be praying to **him,**_ she said, and he felt her quail at the thought.

_I won’t let you. Never!_ he said, and told her who she really was.

_You are a beautiful young woman. Not a goddess, not a queen. One day we’ll go to Ahch-to together and I will make you a crown of flowers, of those sun-gazers. When you’re tired of wearing it, you’ll pluck them out of your hair and throw them into the sky, and we’ll run under the falling flowers, between the sky and the sea!_

_That’s the only crown I want and the only one I need,_ she said gratefully, and now the Force-bond between them was secure and he could pull her close to him in spirit.

Until suddenly she was torn from him by a terrible pain he knew only too well. To his horror, Snoke was there too, a poisonous presence and grasping power reaching along the Force-bond.

_So that’s where you’ve been going. I did wonder how you resisted me so long. Tell me, how is my old friend Kylo Ren?_ he heard, and Rey fell away from him. He heard Snoke’s sneering words threatening her, and then it was as if Snoke were face to face with him, laughing.

_As for you, Kylo, I know you’re there, looking through her eyes, he said. Next time Rey links to you I will take her body. She can try and live in your head, which is probably impossible, or she can float around uselessly as a Force ghost. I don’t care, because I’ll have all the power I need, and I’ll make you both pay for resisting me so long!_

Then like a light switching off, he was gone, and so was Rey. The Force-bond between them was empty.

He had lost her.

* *

Kylo sat on the steps of the House of Justice long into the night. The cold ate into his bones and the damp climbed up from his ruined boots.

He only moved at last when he was disturbed by a drunken trio of First Order supporters who pranced past him, swollen with pleasure at some petty bullying against some Togruta shift workers. Every muscle in Kylo’s body creaked with cold after his long vigil, but he was still a force to be reckoned with. He leapt out of the shadows onto them like a vengeful demon. It was the first time he’d drawn his lightsaber on Fariol.

Afterwards he looked down on their bodies. Spikey had said he counted for something in this war. More than being a space pirate.

Now I’m a petty thug who beats up other petty thugs, he thought to himself.

He was done with slaughtering the sheep who fought in this war. When all was said and done, he himself was no more than a sheep, bewildered and mazed at every turn.

His frozen feet turned of their own accord away from the city’s old quarter, and when a grocery transport passed him on its way to the spaceport, he jumped on top of it and let it take him.

The pair of Trandoshans guarding the perimeter of the spaceport looked surprised to see a shabby scarecrow clear the fence in one bound. Kylo ignored them and headed for the overgrown landing apron where he’d left his ship.

“This is a restricted area!” shouted one, raising his weapon.

“I know,” said Kylo, using the Force to flick it out of the Trandoshan’s hands.

They dogged his heels, speaking into their wrist-comms but uncertain what else to do. Kylo found the familiar outline of his ship with difficulty, its dull black wings almost invisible against the predawn darkness. Lights from the terminal buildings shone dully on its rain-slick surfaces.

“You can’t take that ship! It has parking charges owing on it!”

Kylo turned at last to look at his followers, who shone torches in his face. He wrenched them from their grasp with one flick of his hand. The lights spun up and away into the rainy sky. He caught one and aimed it at the ship’s landing struts. The ship was locked and tied down.

“Tell you what. I won’t kill you, and we can consider my debt settled,” he said, and went to work on cutting the cables with his lightsaber.

The Trandoshans consulted with each other, casting nervous looks at the sparking mess Kylo’s lightsaber made of the locking clamps.

Kylo still had the ship’s door codes on his wristband. The hatch sprang open and the ramp lowered in a long tongue of light.

No time to lose. There was some sounds of alarm and fast engines coming from somewhere nearby. Kylo ran up the ramp and into the cockpit.

He was used to the kind of uproar his departure caused. He ignored the outrage on the ship’s comms systems and hopped the _Dactillion_ across the duracrete, dodging the hostilities aimed at him, until the suborbital engines were powered up. Then he was gone, roaring through the murk and into the clear skies above. The rising sun turned the clouds below him into a fantasy landscape of purest gold. Once he would have found it beautiful, he thought.

He should find somewhere to go before the sleepy defences of Fariol organised some pursuit, he thought. He had nothing in mind as he started to flick through the ship’s Galactic Atlas. The nav unit brought up a helpful prompt, listing recent and regularly-used destinations.

Recent destination: Jakku.

The name glowed on the screen in front of him among all the other choices. With a sense of detachment, Kylo made his selection.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm aware the way I use "Ben" and "Kylo" interchangeably could be confusing, but it's not random. It reflects how the characters feel about him and how he thinks of himself.
> 
> To Luke and Leia he's always Ben.
> 
> Rey and Spikey both know his birth name, but feel it's too personal and private to use casually. It's a secret they feel they were given to keep safe.
> 
> To Kylo himself, he has lived too long and done too many things as Kylo to be able to be simply Ben any more. It's something for him to have admitted he was once a boy named Ben, but Ben will never carry the burden of guilt that Kylo does. 
> 
> * * *


	27. Tuanul Village

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Herakles: If only I could become a rock, unfeeling, oblivious of evil. (Euripides, Herakles )
> 
> For me, this is how far Kylo Ren needs to fall before there is any hope of redemption for him. (This story has existed since April, titled "Why does everyone keep going back to Jakku?" I just needed to find out how Kylo came to be here).
> 
> * * *

He knew exactly what he would find. He knew how the desert could erase things. How the wind and sand gnawed away at everything on Jakku.

There were holes in some of the wattle and daub huts. The shifting sands had almost covered others, pouring in through the doors and windows. Strips of cloth fluttered from the remains of temporary shelters, little more than stacks of sticks. 

The vaporator tower still stood. Some mechanism creaked fitfully within it. Kylo Ren pushed open the door to the underground cistern. A cool black cavern under the desert. His eyes adjusted slowly. The tank was empty but for a damp stain in the middle. Occasionally the silence was broken by a drop of water falling from somewhere above.

He walked up the steps back to the outside. Heat like a blow to the temples, and dazzling light. When his parents hoped he would return to the light, they had not meant it like this. He was sure of that.

Sweat was slicking his skin and sticking his clothes to him. He couldn’t see the use of them now. Laboriously he peeled off everything except a loose under-tunic and pants. Even then he felt as though he was melting in one of Snoke’s Force-tortures. How had Rey stood this heat, year after year, he wondered.

He stood dumbly in the shade of one of the huts for a while. Stood, and then sat. The wind had dropped and the vaporator mechanism had stopped creaking. The nearest huts and the walls of Kelvin Ravine cut off the long views of the desert, but he was still cupped in sizzling light, in profound silence. Even with his eyes shut, the light burned. Burned into his brain, burned out the maddening voices that had plagued him. The silence, at last, was within as well as without.

He would stare into the Jakku sun itself for that gift.

So there was the thing, though. The place he did not want to look at. There in the middle.

He knew the way the desert winds would work on the bones, bleaching and whitening even the burnt ones. He’d studied a few datafiles before returning, and knew that there were predators here. Gnaw-jaws. They would have mauled the remains.

A sensible person would see if the vaporator could be fixed. There were camouflage covers he could put over his shuttlecraft. Perimeter warning sensors he could erect. 

He did none of those things. His brain felt like raw meat. When the sun moved, he moved to follow the shadow. The day passed. His tongue thickened in his mouth and it hurt to swallow. Soon he would go back to the ship for water, he told himself, but never quite found the impulse to move.

There was something near his foot, he noticed. The end of a thighbone, cracked, the marrow sucked out. Burned black at the end. The smell must have been appalling when it happened, he thought. He’d had his mask on, so he wouldn’t have known.

It seemed wrong to leave it there, all on its own, separated from the rest. A lonely bone. He picked it up and slogged slowly through the sand towards the place. It could have some company there. 

The bone clacked onto the pile of other bones he was refusing to look at. Almost a musical sound. That probably meant it was happy, said a timid mouse voice in his mind. There were probably other bones around looking for home. Lonely bones, lonely bones. The words made a staggery rhythm, and the rhythm drove his feet. The staggery way you walk on sand, he thought.

Bending down to gather up more bones, he nearly passed out. He wiped his forehead but it was dry. No more moisture to sweat out. He would never get this job done, he thought, glancing around the troubled sands of what had been the village centre. He slogged back to his ship, a dream walk, climbed in and made his way to the galley. Water. Drink slowly, slowly. Knowledge he’d cribbed from Rey somehow, some time. Slowly, or he’d vomit.

The sun was lower when he came back out of the ship. Picking things up. They might have been belt buckles or tools. Precious to somebody. Put them all on the pile. 

The sun dropped behind the walls of the ravine and for a moment the village was bathed in a rose-coloured haze from the dust hanging above it, caught in the lowering rays. A moment of beauty. Then blue dusk, concealing everything, but soon enough the stars came blazing out in glory above him. Rey must have known them well once.

Some large-sounding creatures howled, not too far away. That would be the gnaw-jaws, he guessed. He trudged to where the raised black wings of his ship cut triangles out of the jewelled sky. Up the ramp and into his cabin. 

Fever dreams. Snoke tried to talk to him but his voice sounded like the whispery creak of the broken vaporator. Kylo couldn’t understand him. Couldn’t see his hologram through the furnace light of the dream sun. 

The next morning he was up before the sun reached into the village. The gnaw-jaws had been busy all night and the bones were scattered again. Patiently he gathered them up. He was prepared this time, with a water bottle so he could revive himself as the heat got up. 

Obviously the bones needed protection, he thought. 

It took days to build a cairn that would keep the gnaw-jaws out. He found a makeshift sled and used it to haul rocks from a talus below the nearest ravine wall. He would have kept working on it longer, but one of Jakku’s famous dust-storms blew up. The breath of R’iia. Days of it. Every now and then he’d stare out the viewport. It gave him satisfaction to catch a glimpse of the dim outline of the cairn through the smoking veils of sand. Something solid he’d made in the whirling world outside. Nobody would ever know who built it or why it was there, but still it was something. 

Not the same as writing his name in blood across the history books of the Galaxy, but perhaps that had not been wholly his own dream.

The ship would run out of water soon. Then he could either fix the vaporator or not. He’d prefer not to fix it, but his body would probably rebel against that plan. It wanted to keep on living, for whatever stupid reason bodies liked to do that.

He’d once told Rey how his grandmother Padme had lost the will to live after birthing her children, and she’d died of it. It was one of the times he’d seen Rey the angriest: a sharp reminder that she’d seen and cared about things that had never crossed his mind.

Rey had blasted back along their Force-link to say that if the malnourished, beaten, hopeless, weeping and abused women she’d seen could survive birthing children they did not want and couldn’t support, then she very much doubted Padme could die of a mere broken heart. A week later she’d come back into his head to tell him she thought Padme was probably assassinated. Whether that was a peace-offering, or what it was, they hadn’t linked again for days after that.

Best if he didn’t think about Rey any more. Thoughts of Rey still had the power to cut through the muffling sun-fried blanket of numbness he’d built.

Weeks passed. Inevitably he found himself climbing up inside the vaporator tower. He thought he would be too weak. Arms shaking. Surprisingly the Force wafted him up, though he had no sense of calling on it. He was becoming transparent, light, a dry leaf. He wasn’t even conscious of what he did to fix the vaporator, the Force singing through his fingers as he tightened and straightened and made whole the broken things. He was just a tool. Always had been. If his heart wanted to keep beating another day, fine. In its service, he’d fix the vaporator, and drink again. 

The teedos must have smelt water. They came by, a group of five, the next day. Kylo watched them from his habitual station slumped in the shade against a landing strut of his ship. They clustered around the door to the cistern, one wary head always turned to keep watch on him. 

“Go on, take it,” he wanted to say, but his voice came out so harshly that it sounded as though he was still wearing his helmet. Too much effort. He gestured with one hand. The teedos filed down into the cistern one at a time, carrying their catch bottles. Afterwards they formed a group to look at the cairn Kylo had built. A short conference followed. Then they turned to him in unison and made a weird bobbing motion. One of them addressed Kylo in their clear, percussive language. They bobbed again, calling out a phrase in chorus. One of them laid something on the ground, and they all left at once.

Whatever it was they’d left, he ignored it until the sand had blown over it. It never reappeared.

The vaporator had been designed to supply a whole village. The cistern filled. One night Kylo was woken by the overflow pumps thumping into life. He ignored the sound. The next morning the open-walled shade-tanks beside the tower had water in them. A day later, a flock of desert hens arrived in a clatter of wings, yawping triumphantly. They’d found the water.

So he’d made an oasis. The silence was gone. Nibbled to death by all kinds of small creatures that peeped and scuttled around the tanks. Hammered to death at last by the steelpeckers, who’d discovered palatable ores on his ship and lost all fear of him. He shooed them away when the noise got too much. He took to filling an old water container first thing in the morning and heading up to the valley rim with it. There he could sit all day and watch the dunes move, grain by grain, from horizon to horizon.

The cairn grew, stone by stone. The wind uncovered more bones, some of them miraculously undamaged. He could look at them now. The delicate articulation of a foot that could fit in the palm of his hand. A child had skimmed across the sand, once, feather-footed. A hand, like a fabulous white flower. They deserved a better memorial. He built more carefully, fitting the stones together. It would never be beautiful, but he did what he could.

His clothes bleached to grey and tore into tatters. His skin burned, blistered, then finally tanned under its coat of ground-in dust.

It was impossible for a ship like his to remain unnoticed on a planet whose entire economy subsisted on scavenging. One day a group of people arrived, bristling with weapons and loaded down with breathing equipment. Impossible to tell what species they were. From the canyon rim he watched them slink towards the open hatchway. Watched them dance with excitement to find the ship empty. They stole it with unseemly haste. Kylo didn’t bother to wave as the ship passed him at eye level. Funny, he’d never named the thing, and Rey’s name had stuck. The _Flappy Dactillion._ They wouldn’t know that.

It only had a few days’ rations left anyway. Now he’d have to eat the chickens and their eggs, like any savage.

He was nothing. Occasionally Snoke’s mind barely touched his, brushing past along some tide of the Force, on its way to find somebody better suited to his needs. A useless, broken thing like him was of no interest to Snoke. He was free.


	28. Why is Everyone Going Back to Jakku?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spikey's not too popular with Finn and Chewie, and Finn's not too happy to hear about his least favourite planet from her.
> 
> * * *

“So you lay the meat on top of the roots, and that way the fat drips down as it cooks?” asked Spikey.

The huge Dowutin next to her grunted in agreement, and she followed his movements as he layered his food on a square of foil.

Spikey had been dithering around the mess hall on D’Qar Base wondering what to do. The kitchens could probably do with her help, she thought, but she hadn’t yet hit on a tactful way to tell them. The smell of better things cooking had drawn her outside to the large aliens’ porch next door, and now she was crouched by the knees of the Dowutin, learning the secrets of the fire-pit barbecue.

After a decade spent at the humano-centric First Order Palace, Spikey felt nervous around aliens, especially huge, brutal-looking ones. This one proved surprisingly friendly however, and at least she could understand him.

“The coals, make deeper. Wait, not red,” he said in his chthonic voice.

“Until they’re not glowing?”

“Yes,” he confirmed, using his enormous claws to arrange the coals how he wanted them. A couple of Wookiees sitting on the too-high benches opposite them growled at him, apparently disagreeing with his methods. Spikey couldn’t follow their discussion.

A third Wookiee came in under the porch, took one look at Spikey, and howled something at the others. Everyone stopped what they were doing and stared at her, faces unreadable. She heard somebody growl, “Kylo Ren?” and an answering rumble of disgust from the others.

The newcomer lunged over with frightening speed, picked Spikey up by one arm and by her belt, and tossed her through the door into the mess hall.

She picked herself up off the floor and flinched at the Wookiee’s shadow as he leaned in the door and gave a parting snarl.

“‘And don’t come back’. Okay, I got that bit,” she said, and limped off to an empty table.

A few minutes later, a voice behind her said, “This is yours”.

She turned to see Captain Stormbringer holding out her chitarra. His dark face seemed wooden, almost hostile.

“Uh. Yes. Thank you,” said Spikey, taking it. When Spikey and the boys had arrived on the _No Pasarán,_ soldiers had taken their bags, including the chitarra. Everything had been handed back except this, for some reason.

She ran her hands over the red wood, tapping gently to check for breaks. Everything seemed sound. She ventured a chord on the strings. They were out of tune from neglect, but still rang out as they should. Of their own accord, her hands went to work on the tuning pegs.

When she looked up again, Captain Stormbringer was still staring at her with an unfriendly expression.

“Is something wrong? Did I say something?” she asked.

Stormbringer shook his head angrily.

“It’s nothing.”

“No, what?” said Spikey, feeling upset. “If I’m causing a problem by being here, or I’m doing something wrong, then I should know.”

“Is it true that you and Kylo…” he stopped. “It’s just that Kylo nearly killed me,” he muttered angrily, looking away from her.

Spikey chewed her lip nervously.

“Awkward,” she said.

Stormbringer snorted.

“Well, trying to kill you, that’d be typical Kylo,” said Spikey. “It’s sheer luck he didn’t kill me too. But hey, that’s history. I’m history. He’s obsessed with Rey now.”

Stormbringer looked even more disgusted.

“That heap of psycho sarlacc shit better not touch her…”

“No, it’s okay, really. He _likes_ her!” said Spikey desperately.

Stormbringer gave her a furious look and stomped off. Spikey could tell she hadn’t made things better.

On a fine afternoon a few days later Spikey took the chitarra to a fenced compound on the outskirts of the base. It wasn’t quite a prison, but the Dathomirian Zabraks inside weren’t exactly allowed out into the rest of the Resistance base unescorted. They didn’t particularly want to come out, either. The freewheeling chaos of the base made them unhappy. It was hard for them to go anywhere, even under escort, without some conflict erupting.

They liked conflict just fine, but nobody wanted to encourage that. So there they were, loosely held as prisoners of war, welcome anywhere so long as they didn’t act like Dathomirians.

Leia had tasked Spikey with entertaining them.

“See if you can bring them out of their shells,” she’d said. “Or make them less miserable somehow. It’ll be weeks before we can negotiate their repatriation to Zabrak.” Spikey had no idea what that was all about, but here she was, sitting outside their fence and plinking away at her chitarra. The Dathomirians ignored her, so she stopped trying to entertain them and started working on scales instead. She sat at an angle so she could see the people inside the fence. They moved with fluid grace in everything they did, self-possessed and nearly silent. The patterns on their skin fascinated her. There were worse ways to spend the day than watching them, Spikey supposed.

“What are you doing?” asked a low voice behind her. One of the Dathomirians had come up behind her in that silent way they had. Now he crouched on the other side of the fence.

“Trying to get better,” said Spikey.

“Better at what?” asked the man. He was strikingly patterned in gold and black.

“Better at doing this,” she said, and doubled the speed of her scales. The man stared at her face and then at her fingers.

“Is it magic?” he asked after a while.

“No. But this is,” said Spikey. She moved her scales into the key of esk, where the notes lay fast and ready to her hands, and launched into an intricate dance underlaid by a pair of notes that pulled like an ebb-tide. The man’s eyes widened and he followed her fingers.

He made a small gesture, and others in the compound drifted over to listen.

“Have you any songs for me?” asked Spikey, when she’d finished.

They spoke softly among themselves. Haltingly, one of them began to hum, and another to translate. Spikey laid the words down, singing them back on a soft net of notes from the chitarra.

She stopped when a shadow fell over her. Captain Stormbringer. On the other side of the fence, the Dathomirians flowed silently into an arrangement of defensive postures.

“The General said you’d get them talking, but I didn’t believe it.”

“Not exactly talking,” said Spikey. She didn’t elaborate. She wanted this man to take his contempt somewhere else.

Instead he crouched down next to her.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

Captain Stormbringer shrugged.

“Maybe. You know the General is looking for her son. We went to Fariol looking for him, like you said. Didn’t find him, but we learned he'd been living on the streets there. People remembered him beating up some First Order supporters, but other than that..." Finn stopped, clearly puzzled by his own story.

"Living on the streets?" She tried to imagine it. 

"Yeah. Just drifting, from the sounds of it. But we didn't find him, and an upsilon-class shuttle left while we were there. Probably his.”

“Big black thing with wings that go up? Yeah, his was like that. I don’t know how common they are.”

“Not very. Say that one _was_ his. Where would he be going?”

“He’d go back to looking for Rey, since he couldn’t find me,” said Spikey. That much seemed obvious. She just couldn’t understand why it had taken him so long. Unless…

“He must have been waiting until he’d figured out where she was,” said Spikey happily. “Then he left.”

The Captain made a disappointed noise.

“We need to talk to him before he gets there. It’s pretty heavily defended. The General doesn’t think he could take it on his own.”

_“What?”_ said Spikey, aghast. “You know where Rey is? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“Why would you care where Rey is? Aren’t you Kylo’s lover or something?” said the Captain. He said the words as though they were dirty.

“What? Yes, I was! But so what? Rey’s my friend. At least, I think she is…I’ve never met her, actually. But she saved my life.”

“What? That makes no sense. Aren’t you two rivals or something? Kylo lusting after her and all?”

“You had to be there,” said Spikey firmly, and struck some provocative chords from the chitarra.

“You know what? I’m glad I wasn’t!” said the Captain, standing up suddenly. Spikey burst out laughing, and then sobered up at his glare.

“Okay okay. It’s complicated. But forget about that. You know where Rey is?”

“Yes, and we’ve already set scanners up watching the space around there. We’d know if Kylo showed up. It’s been a few weeks now, and there’s no sign of him. Where else could he go? Think, Spikey!”

Spikey’s fingers wandered into a minor key as she thought.

“If he couldn’t find Rey, he’d give up hope, I think. He didn’t have much else going on.”

“Where would he go?”

Spikey thought back to her last conversation with Kylo. “If he gave up hope? Jakku, maybe.”

The Captain looked as if she’d hit him.

“Why does everyone want to go back to Jakku?”

‘I don’t know, it’s just a guess. It’s a big Galaxy. He could go anywhere. But if he gives up? He’d bury himself in Tuanul village. It’d be a symbolic thing, and symbols mean a lot to him.”

She spun out a thread of notes, sad and small.

“Or at least, they did. He used to carry round this old melted helmet of Darth Vader’s. Symbolic,” she said.

The Captain laughed bitterly. “Hah, yes, we all knew about that.”

Spikey gave him a blank look.

“On the Finalizer. I was a stormtrooper, you know.”

“Oh yeah. I forgot.” Her fingers picked up an old, old folksong and she bent her head, playing on. The Captain stood, listening. Even the Dathomirians on the other side of the fence listened, heads up, alert.

“What is that?” the Captain asked after a while.

“Some old love song,” she said. The Captain kept staring at her and the silence became excruciating.

“Did you love him?” he said at last.

Spikey looked up. He looked genuinely curious.

“Yes. But I was also his slave. I’m not going back to that.”

She saw a look of understanding on his face. But he couldn’t understand, she thought. Nobody would. You had to have been there, trapped like they were.

“He picked the wrong side,” she continued. “He knows that now, and I don’t think he’s had an easy night’s sleep since.”

“So whose side is he on now?”

“His own, probably.”

“That’s the last thing this war needs. A loose cannon with the Force,” muttered the Captain. He seemed to come to some decision, and turned to go.

Spikey began to sing:

_A star-eyed boy,_   
_I was born in the laser cannon’s blue mouth,_   
_You forged me wings of steel_   
_To cut the gentle air._

_I can land nowhere with these talons_   
_But must strike the earth in blood and fire._

_I will see no more the dawn over Salter’s Rift_   
_Before the jaws of Hell take me…_

The Dathomirians hummed in approval. The Captain paused, and Spikey took it as encouragement.

“If you go to Jakku, can I come too?”

“No!” said the Captain. He turned on his heel and sped off at a fast trot. Spikey hissed between her teeth and segued to one of her songs of heartbreak. They’d been popular on Fariol, but the Dathomirians just looked down their noses at her and wandered off.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	29. On Your Feet, Soldier

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Delapsus resurgam: When I fall, I shall rise
> 
> * * *

He hadn’t come here to seek enlightenment. Oblivion, maybe, but his heart kept beating, day after day, and he couldn’t decide otherwise. Sometimes he thought about ending it, but then some movement of his own hands would catch his attention. The tendons sliding under the skin. Tough, flexible, delicate, lightly coated with dust. A human body, so finely wrought. To destroy it would be to undo a miracle. Probably wrong. All his decisions were bad. Perhaps it was best to let things take their course.

His head was empty of any voices but his own at last. 

And so he sat, now his ship was gone, following the shade that circled around the vaporator tower like the hand of an ancient clock. He was hungrier now, and the climb up to the rim of the ravine took too much energy. 

He wondered whether to use the Force to kill one of the desert hens that had become so used to his presence that they would practically walk over his outstretched legs. His stomach decided it was okay. Really a seamless part of the way things were, here, with things eating and being eaten. He did it with a quick flick of Force that dropped a stone on one of their heads, knocking it out. Painless. 

It tasted both wonderful and terrible, half-burnt and half raw, and not very cleanly gutted. But succulent in places. His stomach roared its approval. 

He slept in one of the rooms attached to the cistern, shutting out the night and the predators. The gnaw-jaws would like to eat him, but there was no reason to allow them. It would be a painful death. He was afraid of pain. It was something to discover that about himself, and have no feelings about it. 

I was Kylo Ren. I am afraid of pain. 

Pain came anyway, a few days later, in the shape of the Millennium Falcon. He knew the sound of its engines right away, and he shaded his eyes to see it against the stunning light of the midday desert. No mistaking that profile, and no question it was heading straight for him. He slumped down with his head almost to his knees. The ship was a curse to him, and he was doomed to meet it everywhere he went in life. He would not look at it. He didn’t need to look at it to know Rey was not inside.

The engines cut out, and there was only the soft hiss of steam and the whine of the hatch opening. The ramp touched the sand with a soft kiss. Footsteps. Heavy. A man. Still Kylo did not look up. 

The feet stopped in front of him. After a pause, the man crouched down to his level. A face he knew, skin like rich dark polished wood. 

“Look at me.”

He found his voice after a long time, raspy and disused. “No.”

“What do you call yourself now?”

He shrugged. He didn’t call himself anything. He’d told Spikey his name was Ben, long ago, and she had accepted it as a gift. Rey wouldn’t, though. She always called him Kylo.

“I’m nobody,” he said, with his barely-working voice. "People can call me what they like."

“You can choose your own name,” said the other, his voice as low and dark as velvet. “I did. If I didn’t like being called Finn, I would have changed it.”

“FN-2187,” he whispered. Who else indeed? Even wearing the same old leather jacket. Rey had liked him. He was probably a good person. 

“It’s Captain Stormbringer now. I made that name too.”

Kylo dropped his eyes and gestured to the ruins, to the cairn he’d made and the bones beneath. 

“You saw what I did. Look at it. If you can bear to look.”

Impulsively he held up what he’d been holding in his hand. Tiny bones, a foot. 

Finn took it from him, turning it over with gentle fingers.

“A baby,” he said. Kylo nodded.

“I’m a monster,” Kylo said.

“He or she had a short life. They didn’t get to choose a path. You are a man. You get to make all the choices this one never will,” Finn said.

“All my choices have been wrong.”

“Not all. Leia says you’ve turned against Snoke. Maybe you even care what happens to Rey.”

“What good can I do? I betrayed Rey. Snoke used me to…to get into her head.”

“You can do as much as any man can. And maybe more than most.”

“I tried,” Kylo whispered. “I used the Force. I thought I was doing good. But I lost her anyway.”

“And we found her! We _found_ her, man!”

Kylo looked up at Finn then, trying to understand the hope and excitement in his voice. But it woke nothing in him except despair.

“What’s the _use?”_ he shouted, voice cracking. “Snoke’s always ahead of us! I thought I’d beaten him, and he always came back!” His voice dropped to a whisper again, and Finn had to lean closer to hear him. “Until now. He’s gone. I’m no use to him. I can’t hear him and I can’t hear Rey. If you think you’ve found Rey, it’s only because Snoke’s laying another trap for you.”

Finn looked as if he’d grab Kylo and shake him. Instead he jumped up and walked a quick circle in front of him before crouching down again so Kylo had to meet his gaze.

“You’re proud of what you do,” Kylo said bitterly. “How can you even stand to look at me? They’ll call me a murderer.”

Finn shrugged. “Not entirely proud. But it’s war. You picked a side. You’ve had your shame. I picked a different side. Now, if we’re going to save Rey, we need the Force,” said Finn.

“I hate the Force. All my power never saved anyone. All I can do is kill.”

“I hate killing too. But still the war goes on, and we’re the ones who can stop it. You.” Finn stood up, and held out a hand to Kylo. A man Rey had liked and trusted.

“On your feet, soldier.”

He really seemed to believe that he’d take it. Kylo remembered how he’d stood on Starkiller Base, feet firmly planted, a solid black shape against the whiteness. Willing to face Kylo then, and not about to back down now, either.

“‘Soldier?’ That’s not soldiering.” Kylo pointed at the bone in Finn’s hand. 

“The war is still hurting people. I may have killed as many as you.”

Kylo looked at him then. Saw the shadows in his eyes. But he was unbowed, sure of his cause. Sweat was pouring down his face and his strong features seemed to glow as though some precious metal shone just under his dark skin. A young war god.

“And I may have saved some, too,” continued Finn. “It’s the war between the Dark and the Light. There are worse things than death, if we don’t win,” said Finn. His hand was still outstretched. “Will you take our side?”

To his surprise, Kylo found himself taking it. Finn pulled him to his feet in one easy motion. “Come on, man. Let’s get out of the heat. You look like you could use a meal.”

* * *

The interior of the Falcon seemed impossibly cool and dark, to the point of luxury. A tightness in Kylo’s chest fell away when he realised Chewie was not piloting. He did recognise the man who was. 

“You know Poe,” said Finn.

Poe gave Kylo an unforgiving stare. “We’ve met.” 

Kylo drew himself up. He would not show weakness before a man he’d once tortured. He could feel his anger uncoiling from its hiding place deep inside him. So it’d been there all along. 

Suddenly he was tired of it, tired of the hot and spiteful words already waiting in his mouth. Instead all he said was, “I don’t work for the First Order now. I’m here because he thinks I can help you.”

Poe looked surprised and rather suspicious. 

“I’ll be your pilot on this service,” he muttered with cheery sarcasm.

“Yeah, I picked Poe to pilot rather than Chewie. Chewie still wants to rip your head off. Whereas Poe is just very angry,” said Finn. 

Poe rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I’m glad that’s all out in the open. Siddown everyone. We’re taking off.”

But Finn was right, Kylo thought. It made it a lot easier having everything out in the open. He didn’t have to lie to these people about who he was, and they didn’t need to spare his feelings. 

He couldn’t allow himself to think about Rey. He had such a need to hear her voice, to feel her vivid presence. To see that bright gaze again. He’d hoped to save her once, and he was not sure he could survive having his hopes destroyed again.

So he focused his attention on the take-off instead, and he had plenty of feelings about that. Nothing felt and sounded quite like the Millennium Falcon launching. He leaned back on the rear door of the cockpit, feet braced against the familiar vibration. The dampers kicked in, softening the blow as the engines punched them through the atmosphere. Soon Jakku was a gold coin against the blackness of space. 

“Let’s eat,” said Finn. “We can talk about what’s been going on.” 

Kylo led the way to the crew lounge and sat quietly. Poe sat on far end of the lounge seat, trying to watch him without being obvious about it. The smell of hot food wafted in from the galley, followed a few minutes later by Finn, carrying trays of heat’n’eat rations. Kylo’s mouth was watering. He grabbed the tray Finn offered him and took a bite, then stopped.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Enjoy,” said Finn, and Kylo resumed eating as though Finn’s words had given him permission. 

“Poe, can you make us some kaf’ when you’ve finished?” 

Soon they were sipping kaffa around the hologram board. Poe had booted up a map of the galaxy. He watched Kylo warily through its transparency while Finn explained.

“Rey has a transponder. It locates her here, on this unnatural-looking asteroid floating just under the Galactic centre. It’s balanced between the pull of the Galaxy-centre black hole and a jet of radiation that comes out of the black hole. Almost certainly an artificial construct.

“Luke’s made a reconnaissance run, jumping in and out of the shadow cast by the planetoid at lightspeed.” Kylo twitched with discomfort at hearing Luke’s name. Finn watched him for a moment and then continued. “He thinks the Knights of Ren are there too. He could sense them in the Force. As well as Snoke of course. And a whole lot of Force in general. We have surveillance drones watching the place now and what we’ve seen suggests that there are not very many people in total.”

“What’s the plan?” asked Kylo.

“We haven’t worked out the details yet. There’s no room to park a big ship in that shadow, which is the only spot life can survive other than inside the planetoid. So we’re thinking a small task force with as many Force users as possible. Some droids, because they’re immune to Force mind control. Their scanners don’t work well with all the mess coming off the black hole flare, otherwise we couldn’t get in at all. The Knights of Ren probably rely on the Force to alert them to other Force users in the vicinity. Luke knows a way to defeat that. You’ll have to learn it from him.”

Kylo twitched again. 

“You got any feelings about it that you want to, y’know, share?” said Finn.

“Probably. Lots. I’ve no idea what they are though, so let’s ignore my feelings and carry on,” he said drily.

“Well, that’s about it. We’ll hash out the details when we meet up with the General.” Finn gave him a searching look.

“How is she?” asked Kylo, after an uncomfortable pause.

“Looking forward to seeing you,” said Finn in a neutral voice. 

“Is she?” said Kylo, equally neutral.

“Yes, she is!” said Poe, chipping in unexpectedly. “Though I’m sure she wants to tan your hide too.”

 _“Poe!”_ Finn swatted at Poe through the glowing Galaxy that hung between them. “Man, you never know when to keep quiet!”

“Why? What did I say?” Poe threw up his hands with a look of innocence.

“This is a delicate situation! Kylo’s, Ben’s family, honestly Poe!” Finn shook his head in a gesture of disgust that also contained a great deal of affection.

Kylo found himself smiling at the obvious friendship between his former enemies, though he could not have said why. Maybe his feelings were out of tune from lack of use, he thought. Maybe he would have random feelings about everything from now on.

“Oh, one of your other friends wants to see you, I think,” said Finn, turning back to him. “That goofball.”

“I wasn’t aware I had other friends,” said Kylo.

“Yeah you do. Spikey.”

 _“What?_ ” said Kylo, and this time he was sure of what he felt. “She’s _alive?”_

“Yeah. She came into D’Qar a few weeks back. Apparently Snoke tried to get her, and missed.”

Hello, feelings, thought Kylo, and he sat there, his cheek muscles hurting with the unaccustomed work of smiling. Finn and Poe exchanged a pleased look.

“Told you so,” muttered Finn.

“I still don’t get it,” said Poe. “I thought he was….”

“I’m just _happy_ that another person has survived knowing me,” interrupted Kylo. And it was true. His feelings about Rey were too intense to look at right now. But with Spikey, he had nothing to regret. Freeing her was a victory Snoke had not managed to erase. “Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s been a long day and and I have a lot to think about.”

“Refresher’s that way. Just saying,” said Poe, pointing.

“I know my way round the Millennium Falcon, thanks!” said Kylo. 

Just then a white and orange BB droid rolled out of the locker room. Startled, Kylo aimed a kick at it, then did a double-take. _That_ droid! It had to be the droid he’d been searching for when this whole sorry mess began. He shook his head in disbelief. The droid twerdled with alarm and whisked out of his way.

“Your dad didn’t like him either. ‘Move, ball!’ was about limit of his conversation with our ole’ mate BB8, from what I hear,” said Poe. 

As he went off he could hear Finn saying “You are so _insensitive_ Poe. What is _wrong_ with you, man?”

But it was all right, thought Kylo later as the sonic shower shocked weeks of accumulated dirt off him. His skin peeling, new skin blushing underneath. Life, he thought. People, feelings, memories, all the little jabs and blows. The stubborn tendrils of hope raising their heads deep within him. This body of his, which he had mistreated and which was still mostly whole. Broken, mended and remade. Still a work in progress.


	30. Leia and Kylo talk

Leia took the call from the Millennium Falcon in her room. Finn was on the other end, looking into her eyes with the kind of solemn happiness that is deeper than any smile.

“I have someone here that wants to talk to you,” he said simply, and moved aside.

For a long time Leia just stared at her son’s image on the hypercomm. He seemed to waver and then solidify, as though deep underwater. Or maybe it was her tears, or even her mind, trying to see the boy and the man at the same time, an image she could not hold steady. 

How thin he was, his outsized features pulled tight against his bones, his skin a parched brown she’d never seen before. Weeks alone in the desert, Finn had said. A man’s face, now, with a big beak of a nose and thick dark brows like the brush strokes of a master calligrapher.

Those eyebrows were pulled up and his mouth pulled down in that pout of pain she’d never been able to bear. She realised how she’d always brushed his pain aside, willing him to toughen up.

He was searching her face for something only she could give him.

“I missed you so much,” she said simply.

“I’m so sorry. I wish I could undo it, all of it.”

“What’s done is done. We failed you, Ben. You needed us, and we didn’t see it.” She had rehearsed that line to herself, and said it without hesitation. It was the best truth she could arrive at, after long thought. The truth could be many things, and some truths had more to offer than others.

Ben looked down, abashed. “I don’t know what they’ve told you, but Dad did an amazing thing. The last thing he did. When Snoke had such a hold on my mind that I believed I had to kill my own father, he took _away_ Snoke’s victory. He _showed_ me…what I never understood before.”

“I felt something in the Force,” she said, and waited for him to go on. He met her eyes at last, with difficulty.

“He offered himself. He said he would do anything for me. Even when I killed him, he just reached up and touched me, so gently.” 

Ben touched his own cheek to show her, and Leia began to cry. She could imagine it so clearly that it seemed she felt Han’s touch on her own cheek.

“He was so brave, Ma. I realised I didn’t know what courage was. Or love. I wasn’t sure of _anything_ any more. All the things Snoke had told me. They weren’t worth…” 

“What did Snoke promise you?” asked Leia, trying to keep the bitterness out of her voice. Ben looked up sharply, looking for an attack. Leia waved her hand as though to dispel his fears. “No, I’m sorry, it doesn’t matter now anyway. I’m sure he would have promised whatever you wanted most, no matter what it might be.”

“Pretty much,” said Ben uncomfortably. His mouth worked as if there were a lot more he could have said.

“Everyone’s secret desires are ugly, I imagine,” said Leia. “It’s just lucky most people aren’t offered the chance to act on them.”

“Except you!” burst out Ben. “You were always fighting for peace and justice. How could I live up to that? You didn’t have any faults!”

“My own father tortured me and didn’t recognise me. You have no idea the hatred that left me with! I saw how his anger and hatred had consumed him. I have lived my whole life at war with my own anger, Ben. It’s an ugly, ugly thing. If I had ever lashed out blindly in a rage, I would have been letting him win.”

Ben looked up at her then, his face suddenly alight with intensity. He’d understood something, she thought, and watched his eyes go wide and clear. He nodded sharply.

“It’s difficult,” he said. “All that anger has to go somewhere.”

“It’s difficult, and we’re hardest on the ones we love the most. Han and I weren’t together for the last few years, you know. It was just too hard.”

Ben bowed his head. “I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”

“Maybe some of it. But we always fought. You remember. You always felt it too much, I think. We should have realised.”

“It gave me bad dreams…”

“I remember,” Leia said, and she did. “I wish I could have…I don’t know! Taken away your fears, or something.”

Ben’s face twisted. “I just want to _kill_ Snoke now, so _much._ He fed on my fears…he’ll be doing it to Rey now. We have to rescue her, Ma!”  
 “If anyone can survive Snoke, she can. She’s a tough young lady.”

“Yes, she’s….” Ben fell silent, but his feelings were clear enough. 

“I’ve become very fond of her too, Ben.”

“But we have to hurry! Snoke’s driving her mad!”

“We’ve been watching his hideout, and we want to go there as soon as you join us. It has to be a small attack party, all Force-users. Snoke’s got the Knights of Ren with him, we think, but very little more than that.” 

Leia explained what they had learned so far, and Ben nodded impatiently, adding what he knew to her guesses. He was quick to catch the drift of her thoughts. Time and time again Leia was surprised by the way Ben’s ideas matched hers as they sifted through their options for a raid on Snoke’s base.

“Ben, it feels incredible to be doing this…planning this together with you. It’s so easy!” she said at last. “I’ve missed you.”

He nodded. “Going on a mission together.” 

“There’s one more thing,” she said, less happily. “When you meet our ship, nobody has been told who you are, and we’re not drawing attention to you. I’m not going to deny who you are, but I’m hoping we can leave before anyone recognises you. But when we come back, questions will be asked. I’m hoping that if we can take down Snoke together and destroy the First Order, anything you did before that will be considered as acting under duress. I don’t know if it would come to trial, or who would try you.”

“It’s not just a family matter, is it?” said Ben seriously. “They’ll call me a war criminal.”

“No legal system is set up to deal with problems people like Snoke cause,” said Leia. “If they insist on trying you, I’ll follow you out of their jurisdiction. Into exile. Wherever.”

“That’s a big price to pay,” said Ben, after a shocked pause. “I’ve done some pretty bad things. You shouldn’t have to suffer for them! You’d be leaving everything you’d fought for!”

“I’d be admitting I didn’t have faith in our justice system,” she said. “That’s the worst of it. But I can’t just throw you to the wolves.” She shrugged. “If we defeat Snoke, the Resistance won’t need me any more. Since the attack on the Hosnian system, the New Republic has the will to rout out the First Order without my encouragement.”

He nodded slowly, considering her words. He wasn’t running away from his guilt, she saw. It would always be there, but he’d found a way to live with it, the weight he would carry forever.

“Well,” he said at last. “Let’s get Snoke.”

“It’s high time,” said Leia, and they shared the same battle-hungry grin through the screen. “See you soon!” 

Both of them hovered their hands over the “off” button, unwilling to end the call. Finally Ben reached out and touched the screen as though to brush her cheek. Leia smiled, understanding, and did the same. Then they ended the call together.

When a child is born, you realise that you will never stare into the eyes of another human being like that, Leia thought. There is no friend, no enemy, no lover whose eyes you could ever know so well.


	31. Face to Face at Last

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Leia and Spikey fly to meet Kylo, Finn and Poe
> 
> * * *

“Hey, are you Chewie?”

The Wookiee loping towards the hangars paused to snarl at Spikey. Probably the right one then, Spikey thought. 

“Are you friends with Rey? Somebody said you were friends with Rey!” she yelled at the Wookiee’s retreating back. The Wookiee turned and advanced on her, making tearing motions with his huge hands.

“I’m friends with Rey too. I just thought you should know!” she said, backing away. “So maybe we could be not-enemies?”

Chewiee turned away without a word. But also without ripping her head off. 

“Diplomacy attempt, tick off today’s list,” she said to nobody in particular. People and droids went back to tinkering with machinery, ignoring her now the angry Wookiee had gone. She wandered over to the Dathomirian compound. They were probably the only people more bored than Spikey. 

“Captivity sucks, doesn’t it?” she said through the fence to the nearest one. Somebody had put a bench nearby, so she sat on it and unslung her chitarra. Morse, Sorgen and Deepal walked by and waved, but didn’t stop. They’d all found ways to make themselves useful around the base, and were on their way to the morning shift at the comms centre.

A while later she looked up to find General Organa standing by, listening. She often didn’t dress in her white uniform, and without it she moved almost unnoticed around the base, Spikey thought. A small woman who moved a little stiffly as though carrying old injuries. If half the stories Spikey had heard were true, she had to have plenty of those. 

Plus she had Kylo for a son! What a nightmare that would be! Spikey had learned that most people on D’Qar thought Kylo had blown up the Hosnian system. It was a wonder the General could even get out of bed in the mornings, if that was so.

He’d told her that was all Hux though, and Spikey was inclined to believe him. The General would like to know that, she thought.

“You play very well,” said the General politely. 

“I have a lot of time to practice. Is there something else I could do around the place?”

“Not on the base, but there is something,” said the General, with a rather strange smile. Spikey suddenly felt her throat tighten with anticipation.

“How would you like to take a trip with me? We’ve found Ben. I’m flying out to meet him.”

“When?”

“Right away.” 

“Yup! Just let me pack a bag…how is he? Is he all right? Where was he?” Spikey leapt off the bench and jittered on her feet, ready to be away in an instant.

“Jakku. And….he is okay. Finn and Poe have got him in the _Millennium Falcon.”_ Leia caught something in Spikey’s expression and said, “He came willingly. He is…himself.”

“I knew it! Where shall I meet you? When?”

“Hangar Two in half an hour. We’ll fly up to the _No Pasarán_ , and it’ll take us to a rendezvous with the _Falcon.”_

Luke was flying the old C-wing starfighter that took them up to orbit. To Spikey it looked more like a kitchen appliance than a spaceship. It was pretty cramped, and her face was pressed up against the transparisteel viewport, a lot closer to the vacuum of space than she liked. 

Luke and the General worked as a team, smoothly, hardly speaking. They’d flown together many times before, Spikey guessed. She was crammed in the back with Luke’s droid R2D2, who was not what one could call a cuddly droid. Every now and then he would extrude a tool towards her chitarra, which was in everybody’s way, and she would have to slap him. 

“Luke, could you please tell your droid not to fiddle with the chitarra?”

R2D2 made an irritated buzzing noise. Spikey was ready to clock him.

“Why do you want me along, anyway?” asked Spikey.

Leia swivelled herself around on the copilot seat. “Well, I knew you’d want to see him. But it’s more for him I think. Or me. Even though we’ve talked on the hypercomm, it could be pretty tense when we meet. You’re a familiar face, and Rey said you were good at calming him down.”

“Rey!" said Spikey. She’d almost forgotten about her. “Finn told me you guys guys already found her, right?”

Leia gave her a triumphant smile. 

“Yes! And with Ben’s help, we mean to rescue her. Ben’s immensely powerful, you know!” 

It was odd to see how the General’s eyes softened and glowed with pride at her son’s ability to obliterate things. Spikey was far too smitten by Kylo for her own good, but even so she was not a big admirer of his destructive powers.

“Yeah, I know. He fixed up his lightsaber and it’s going better than ever,” she said. 

“What colour?” said Luke, with interest, craning around his seat’s headrest.

“Sort of orangey gold.”

Luke looked pleased by that. 

“Hey, I’m not part of this rescue mission, am I?” said Spikey.

The General laughed as though the idea were absurd. Which was a relief. When she’d stopped laughing she told Spikey they were probably going to have to face Snoke in order to rescue Rey. Anyone without the Force would only be a hindrance. 

“Phew. I mean, good luck,” said Spikey.

The C-wing swooped into the landing bay of the _No Pasarán_ with more grace than its clunky design would suggest. Threepio was there already, and conducted them to their cabins. Nobody else met them, so evidently this mission was being kept quiet. Spikey dumped her gear in her cabin and went to find food. Free food, one of the things she loved about the Resistance.

The ship gave a small shudder under her feet and she could see, through a viewport at the end of the corridor, that they had boosted into hyperspace. 

* * * *

Although Spikey hung close to the General’s side when the _Millennium Falcon_ touched down in the No Pasarán’s landing bay, she felt she was more there as a good luck charm than anything else.

When the hatch opened, she expected Kylo to come down the ramp with all the nervy alertness of a racing greysor. Instead he came slowly. A tall, reserved man who moved purposefully. He was thin and tanned almost beyond recognition, and his hair was tied in in a long ponytail.

He saw his mother and his face grew still and watchful, looking steadily between her and Luke.

It was the General who ran to him, throwing her arms around him in a hug that must have made even Kylo’s ribs creak. He let out his breath in a long sigh, folding his mother into his arms. Luke followed and patted Kylo on the shoulder. He was every bit the Jedi, thought Spikey. He must have a lot of feelings, but he wasn’t going to let the past cloud the present. A wise man.

She did a finger-wave at Kylo, catching a pleased flicker of recognition from him. That would have to be enough. Proud people never like to be seen crying, Spikey thought, and backed slowly out of sight. It was going to be okay. She felt a warm glow as though she’d seen a story have a happy ending. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	32. Council of War

After the hugging and awkward handshaking was over, Leia took Kylo to eat with her in the privacy of her cabin on the _No Pasarán._ Threepio served the meal, his immobile face expressing no emotion. That was probably one reason Leia had chosen him to wait on them, Kylo thought. 

“Threepio’s quieter than I remember,” said Kylo. 

“I finally got it through his thick metal skull that sometimes, the less said the better. He’s convinced he should try and mimic humans by emoting everywhere, but it really doesn’t work,” said Leia.

“Kind of like me, then,” said Kylo. That surprised a quick smile out of Leia. 

“Really?” Her eyes were sharp but kind.

“At the moment. I don’t know what to feel.” 

Neither of them had much to say, it seemed. Maybe they’d already said what mattered over the hypercomm, Kylo thought.

“More tea Ben?” Leia leaned close to ask him, holding out the pot. He wasn’t used to people being so close, and had to suppress an urge to back away.

“No.” Kylo looked at his feet. “I’m sorry, I don’t know how to talk any more. I’ve been in a desert too long. I didn’t really talk to people while I was Fariol either. I was too busy listening for Rey in the Force.”

“Ah well. I never knew how to do small talk.”

“You were the _queen_ of small talk! I was always amazed how you got diplomats and politicians eating out of your hand, even when they’d walked into a room prepared to hate you!” said Kylo.

His mother rolled her eyes. “It always felt like I was faking it.”

“Maybe you were using the Force to figure out what they wanted to hear,” he ventured.

“Huh! Maybe. Luke says the same thing. Anyway, are you ready to get down to business? We should have a council of war. Like I said on the comm, it’ll be Luke and you and me going to Snoke’s hideout. Finn and Poe will fly us. Shall I call them in now?”

“Sure.”

“Have you spoken to Luke?”

“Not yet,” said Kylo, feeling uncomfortable. “How does he feel about …what happened?” He straightened up and corrected himself. “About what I did.”

“He’s had time to think about it. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you he feels like he let you down too. Whatever you think of him, just remember, we’ve all changed since you last saw us.”

“Ma, I don’t need to keep hearing how guilty everyone else feels. _I_ did those things. Not them. _Me.”_

“If you couldn’t say that, I wouldn’t be talking to you now,” said Leia crisply, and Kylo wondered how far her forgiveness really went. Only time would tell, he supposed. 

“Come on, I’ll call the others,” Leia said. She spoke into her wristcomm, and Luke, Finn and Poe knocked on her door a minute later.

“So. The war,” began Leia, once everyone had sat down. “It's not open war as yet, but there aren’t a lot of planets that are really at peace either. Everyone’s being forced to pick sides. 

“The First Order is much weaker than the New Republic, but they’re also more ruthless and their strongholds are better hidden. But it’s not simply a matter of their territories versus ours. This war is being fought over an ideology, isn’t it?”

Kylo nodded.

“Who sets that ideology, on their side? Old Imperials, or Snoke?” asked Finn.

“Snoke,” said Kylo, after a pause, the name sticking in his throat. “He’s not just a figurehead calling himself Supreme Leader. He found the old Imperials useful and moulded them to his needs, not the other way around. The Huxes and the other First Order families might think the First Order is their idea, but that’s only true as long as their ideas are the same as Snoke’s.”

“Thank you,” said Finn, who seemed to have an active role in the discussion. “Even from the inside, as a stormtrooper, it was difficult to be sure of that. The upper ranks were a bit distant to us.”

“Snoke made sure nobody knew what anyone else was doing most of the time,” Kylo said. Now he could see how it had made everyone frantic to claim the high ground, nearest to Snoke, where they might hope to gain power and safety. Relative safety.

“Well, so that’s the war we’ve been fighting,” said Leia. “But Luke and I believe, and Rey did too, that there’s another war, one that involves only Snoke and other Force-users. Rey was captured because of that, not because Snoke thought she would lead some attack-wing of fighting Jedi or something.”

“I know,” Kylo said. He explained what he had learned through the Force-bond before Snoke had discovered how he and Rey were using their connection. 

“So he’s using her as some sort of catalyst,” said Luke. “Is that right? He thinks she can turn the Force into something that will worship him as a god, and then he will actually _be_ a god?”

“As far as we could understand it. Snoke’s so full of lies that it’s hard to know what to believe.”

Everyone thought about that for a while. Finally Leia shook her head irritably. “Well, it doesn’t make any difference. Whatever he’s up to, we have to stop him. It’s not a big base that he’s built. Only occasional visits by small ships, supply ships flown by the Knights, we believe, so we don’t get any sense of a large number of people in there. Otherwise we’d see more supplies and general activity.”

“Rey never saw anyone but Snoke and the Knights of Ren. And the usual security drones. So what then?” asked Kylo. “We fly in and get dropped off? Or fly and park?”

“Fly and park,” said Poe. “One of the Knights’ supply runs took him to a neutral base for repairs on his ship. We had an agent there, and she had his ship’s transponder and ID signallers copied. We’ll stick them on the _Falcon.”_

“What if their ship gets back first? Won’t they notice there’s a second one using the same codes?” asked Kylo.

“If anyone checks,” said Finn. “I’ve done those kind of sentry duties. Nobody actually looks outside, or even monitors the status screens. An alarm is supposed to go off if an unknown ship lands. It won’t go off just because there are two identical ones.”

“We’ll go in with pressure suits. We probably can’t use any pressured landing bays without triggering something, so we’ll have to walk around the surface and find some airlock we can cheat into opening.”

“You mean use the Force?” said Finn. “And don’t tell me that’s not how the Force works.” 

“I might be able to,” said Kylo.

“Or R2D2 can hack their systems through a dataport,” said Leia. “It’s a specialty of his.”

“Their own ships might connect to a base airlock, if they don’t use pressured landing bays,” said Poe. “We’d enter their ship through its emergency hatch, and then get into the base through the ship’s main door.”

“You and Finn are going to plant charges. If everything else goes to hell, you blow that piece of weird space rock to dust.”

Possibly a suicide mission, thought Kylo. Finn and Poe nodded, accepting the unspoken truth.

“How powerful are the Knights, Ben?” asked Leia.

“They’re all Force-sensitive and they’ve done a lot of weapons training, but they’re not particularly strong with the Force,” said Kylo. “We did a lot of sparring, and I could hold off three at once. A couple of them died from fighting each other after I left, but Snoke seems to have recruited more. Rey told me she saw at least seven.”

All this time Luke had said nothing. Kylo had not forgotten he was there, and their glances crossed from time to time, but they did not speak to each other. Despite this, the feeling grew on him that he knew Luke now. Luke’s silence and patience were like his own, born out of an even longer withdrawal from the world.

Finally Luke spoke, and he looked directly at Kylo.

“Ready for action?” he asked. But the way he said it was not a challenge. It felt like an offer. The best offer Kylo had had in a long time.

“Ready for action,” said Kylo, feeling the Force reawaken in him, surer and more steady than ever before.

“We’ll sleep aboard the _No Pasarán_ tonight while the _Falcon_ is loaded, and leave first thing tomorrow, then,” said Leia, sizing up the moment.

And with that, the meeting was over. In less than twelve hours, they’d be on their way to rescue Rey. Kylo felt his heart pounding, counting down the hours.


	33. Halfway to Goodbye

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kylo and Spikey and their bittersweet not-quite-romance. One of them is willing to call a spade a spade, and the other doesn't like to hear it.
> 
> * * *

Spikey knocked timidly on the door of Kylo’s room on the _No Pasarán._ Ben’s room. She still thought of it as his secret name, even to herself. She found it odd to hear Leia use it so casually.

Kylo answered it and stood looking down at her, eyes hooded, his feelings folded into him where once he’d worn them all dangerously on the surface. New lines were carved into his face, bracketing his mouth, and his skin was weathered to a leathery tan. He was terribly thin, accentuating his long crooked nose. He looked more than ever like a bird of prey. She reached up tentatively to touch the sharp blade of one cheekbone. His eyes softened and he said her name, her own secret name. She smiled.

“I thought you were dead,” he said, then.

She nodded. “I know. We couldn’t reach you. You saved my life again, getting me off Fariol in time.” She stepped up and wrapped her arms around him, fingers working over his ribs, the knobbly road of his back. “You poor thing. You are so thin!”

She leaned up into him, craning her neck to see his face. He still looked to be slightly in shock. It must have been a big day for him, she thought.

“How was it? With your mum?” she asked shyly. She didn’t know if he would talk to her about such private things. So much of their relationship had been founded on their shared loathing for most other people, after all.

Kylo took a deep breath and didn’t answer at first, just leaning his cheek on the top of her head. She tucked her head down to make things comfortable, and brushed one of her tears off his collarbone. He reached up to wipe her face with his thumb, very gently.

“It was…not as difficult as I thought it would be,” he said after a while. She felt him relax against her a little, but one hand was drumming nervous fingers on her back. “I keep waiting to see if she’ll lose patience and snap at me,” he said. “Or if it’s an act, something she’s doing because it’s expedient and she needs my Force powers. How can she really forgive me?”

“You know, I’ve heard women talk about babies they’ve lost,” said Spikey, musing on it. “Years later, twenty, thirty years later, they say that not a day goes by that they don’t think of that baby, and grieve for it. I’m not a mother so I don’t really know. But when I remember that, it doesn’t surprise me that Leia wouldn’t….I don’t know. A mother’s love is different, that’s all I’m trying to say. Stronger than we imagine, maybe.”

“It’s not the same thing at all! Babies are easy to grieve for,” said Kylo. “They’re innocent.”

“You were that baby once, though. Maybe to her, that baby is here now as much as anyone you’ve become since then,” said Spikey. “It’s a different way of seeing.”

“I don’t think she always saw me that way,” said Kylo sadly.

“It takes time and distance sometimes,” said Spikey.

“I keep worrying she’ll change her mind,” said Kylo. “She used to be so critical.”

“Don’t you think she understands what Snoke did to you, how he worked?”

Kylo thought about it. “It’s not just that though. I think she always mistrusted the Force. She didn’t want to see it in me, and even when she did, she wasn’t willing to deal with it.” He chewed his lip, disturbed by some memory. “It used to make me angry, because she has the Force too, and used it in her own way. But she wouldn’t admit it.”

“Well I expect she’s had time to think about it all. No point worrying about arguments before they happen, either.”

Kylo sat on the bed, feet stretched in front of him. Spikey sat at the other end. Kylo was still wearing his ruined boots. Spikey inspected them and they disintegrated in her hands.

“I’ll take these, and I can use them to size you a new pair from the ship’s stores,” she said. She tossed them on the floor. “Leia brought a bag of clothes for you too. I’ll bring it tomorrow and we can see what fits.”

“What, she’s kept my old clothes? I never thought she’d be such a hoarder!”

“No, just stuff she scraped together on D’Qar. I had to remind her how tall you were.” She started massaging his feet, marvelling at the size of them. Kylo closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall behind him.

“Tell me about Rey. Did you connect again on the Force-link, after the last time I talked to you?”

As Kylo told her about Rey’s imprisonment, Spikey felt overwhelmed by the strangeness of it all: the magical Force-bond and the way Kylo and Rey had used it to protect her from Snoke’s tortures.

“What is Snoke trying to do?” she asked. “What is he doing with the Force, and this religion thing?”

“Trying to make Rey believe he’s a god. Or make the Force believe in him, through her. I don’t know if it could work or not.” Kylo gnawed on one of his knuckles, obviously worried.

“I always wondered if the Force could think, and what it might want, if it could. What does Rey believe in?”

“Herself,” said Kylo, with such pride in his voice that Spikey wilted. She couldn’t believe she’d ever had any place in this fairy tale. What would it be like to feel another person almost as part of oneself? Wonderful and terrible, she thought, as Kylo described how Snoke had cut their contact for good.

“She sounds so brave,” said Spikey, and saw Kylo glow with admiration. He was more focused she’d ever seen him, alight with impatience to rescue Rey. If he did, it was only right that he would stay with her. Rey was his match, tall and beautiful and fearless, and gifted with the same strange powers.

Yet as they sat there, she could feel Kylo’s gaze on her like a magnet. It would be so easy to lean forward, to kneel across him, to stroke that long hair out of his face and kiss him. Either of them might make the first move. He was still essentially a selfish person, and she had no idea how his morality would see these things. Or how Rey would, even. She felt a light touch against her mind: he was watching her thoughts.

He gave a little jerk of his chin, inviting her over.

“You’re in love with Rey, though.”

“I missed you. We’re both lonely people. Unless you’ve got some new friend on D’Qar?”

“Most people avoid me on D’Qar.”

“Why?”

“Something to do with having been your girlfriend. People are awful gossips, you know?”

Kylo grimaced. “Their loss. Come here.” He patted the bed next to him.

Spikey wondered if he’d forgotten she wasn’t his servant, or anyone’s slave now. Suddenly the warm spot on the bed next to Kylo lost some of its glamour.

“I’m not your girlfriend any more! Leaving you once hurt bad enough. Why break my heart over you twice?”

“I _know_ you’re not my girlfriend. But…”

“But _what?_ I can be your second-best girlfriend? No thanks.” She pushed his feet off her lap and got up. “I have things to do.”

“Like what?”

“Crying, mostly. I _hate_ that you’re going into danger. Gungan gods, though, I hope you get Snoke and you _crush_ him!” She jumped off the bed, scooped up Kylo’s wrecked boots, and rushed out of the room before she could change her mind.

 

 

 

 

 


	34. Attack Party

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The mission to rescue Rey and defeat Snoke sets off. Not everyone is keen to be involved.
> 
> * * *

The next day Leia assembled the attack party in the _No Pasarán’s_ landing bay, where they stood in a group around the landing struts of the _Millennium Falcon._ Leia had decided to take only Poe, Finn, Luke, and Ben, along with R2D2 and BB8.

It made sense to use the _Millennium Falcon_ to get to Snoke’s stronghold, she said. It was the fastest ship they had over that kind of distance. Privately, she longed to see deep space again from the _Falcon’s_ cockpit. Even if Han’s absence spoke to her from with every grime-encrusted corner, a mission like this, with a small team, felt like the old days. It was only right to take their old ship.

“I don’t feel good about taking you in so close to Snoke’s hideout,” said Poe. “All along you’ve been talking about not putting all our key players in one place. If anything happens to us, the Resistance is still going to need you to lead them.”

“If we fail to defeat Snoke, there may not be anything left for me to lead. Not for long, anyway. And I won’t send you into danger I wouldn’t face myself,” said Leia.

Ben, who had been staring darkly at the floor, straightened up and snapped her an unreadable look. She returned it with as much warmth as she could. Yes, she had abandoned him to face his fears alone, once. Never again.

“Death or glory,” he muttered. Leia had to rack her brains before remembering it was a line from a favourite bedtime story of long ago.

“Death or glory, yes.”

Ben nodded back slowly, and she remembered how they used to make up stories together when he was a boy. All the adventures they’d go on, just him and her. Sometimes in their stories it was Han they had to rescue. Leia turned away quickly, but still saw Ben grimace as he caught the drift of her memories.

Spikey came into the landing bay, hauling a bag.

“Yo. Clothes,” she said briefly to Ben, and Leia felt the tension rise as he switched his attention to the girl. She dropped the bag at his feet and turned away.

“Wow, really the _Millennium Falcon,”_ said Spikey admiringly, gazing up at it.

“Can you help organise some carrier droids to load the ship please? Threepio can show you where,” said Leia. The girl left with Ben’s eyes still on her. It was a good thing to get her out of the way, thought Leia. Ben caught _that_ thought too, and threw Leia an angry look.

They were going to have to learn how to control that, or they’d end up rubbing each other raw with every random thought, Leia thought. Would Ben and Rey fare any better?

She felt Ben withdraw, forming some kind of mental shield that offered nothing more than a blank reflection.

* *

Half an hour later they were ready to leave. Theirs was a very low-profile mission. Keeping Ben out of the public eye was part of it: Leia knew it’d be a lot easier to present him to the Resistance as the man who’d overthrown Snoke. Without that, well, not much point coming back to a Resistance that wouldn’t welcome her son.

She hated the way her mind seemed to hatch plans around people she loved, often without her volition. Already part of her was scheming how to get Ben accepted. Forgiven, as she’d forgiven him. They’d have to catch Hux or find First Order officers willing to testify that Ben had had no part in the attack on the Hosnian system.

First destroy Snoke. Worry about the rest later. She’d lived to see the day her son returned. Be content with that, she told herself.

Chewie and Admiral Ackbar showed up at the landing bay to see them off, as well the captain of the _No Pasarán._

Ackbar was followed by a mouse droid carrying a bottle of Mon Calamari Fire and a tray of shot glasses. Ackbar’s eyes were just about hanging out of his head with exhaustion and worry. If the attack party didn’t return, he’d be the one responsible for explaining to the Resistance what had happened. Leia had refused to brief him on what else he should do if she didn’t come back.

“Ugh, I’ll pass,” said Leia, when he offered her a glass. “I’ll drink when I can dance on Snoke’s grave.”

The others gathered round and took one each. Ackbar poured them all a measure and they stood in a circle by the _Falcon’s_ ramp. They were the only people in the landing bay, and the huge space dwarfed them.

“Death and deliverance!” said Ben, raising his glass dramatically. The others followed suit.

“A bit grim, but it’ll do,” said Poe, downing his shot. Ben raised an eyebrow at him and Poe gave him a cocky grin back, refusing to be impressed.

“You’re missing the party,” said Poe, looking past Leia. Spikey and Threepio had appeared, shepherding a final box of supplies. Spikey joined their circle, leaving Threepio to shoo the box up the ramp on its repulsorlifts.

“Fashionably late, that’s all,” she said, giving Poe a wan smile. He handed her a drink, and she raised it as she’d seen them do.

“To the utter destruction of our enemies. May they writhe helplessly under your smiting force, until they taste the ashes of defeat.” She seemed to be quoting something, only half seriously.

Ben and Spikey certainly shared a taste for the over-dramatic, Leia thought. But then Spikey’s voice rose and took on a shivering sing-song quality as she made some kind of formal invocation Leia didn’t recognise.

“May their victims rise on the wide wings of freedom, with the moon on their left shoulder and the stars on their right, and their feet on the midday path. May our friends prevail.”

“Yeah,” said Finn, on a long-breathed sigh. He seemed moved by her words. He too had been a slave, Leia thought.

Spikey turned to Leia, her eyes glittering. “Thank you General Organa. You’ve been very kind. I hope you succeed.” She dithered a moment, looking as though she might like to hug Leia, but thought better of it. She turned to the rest. “Good luck.”

Ben locked eyes with her and Spikey paused in the act of turning away.

“Come with us,” he said in a low voice.

“What? What would I do? Kill Snoke with my cooking? Distract him with soprano jokes?”

Spikey had her hands on her hips, feet firmly planted in the posture of “no”. Kylo glared down at her from his much greater height. Leia could feel him considering whether he could use the Force to change her mind. Evidently Spikey could feel it too, or knew him well enough, for her eyes narrowed. Beside her, Leia felt Luke straighten warily.

Ben shot Leia a look as though to say _I wasn’t going to! Honest!_

Impulsive as ever, Leia thought. At the very least, this should have been a private conversation.

Ben’s mouth was turning down at the corners and his brows going up into peaks. The same look of appeal he’d used as a child.

“I’d like you to come, is all,” he said, even more softly.

_Don’t fall for it, you stupid girl_ , thought Leia.

“I’ll get my chitarra,” said Spikey shortly, and stormed off back to her cabin, trailing a complex backwash of feelings.

Ben relaxed. Poe and Finn gave each other the side-eye, and Poe whistled between his teeth. Even BB8 made a long, low sound of disapproval.

“Uh-oh,” said Finn.

“She’s nothing more than a potential hostage, Ben!” said Leia furiously once Spikey was out of earshot. “She can’t fight, she hasn’t got the Force, and she’s terrified!”

“The General’s right,” said Finn seriously. He laid a hand on Ben’s arm to calm him down. “She’s no use, and if she’s taken hostage, you may have to leave her. You can’t stop to rescue her when we’re on our way to take out Snoke and get Rey. Same goes for me or Poe for that matter - our lack of Force abilities makes us a liability on this mission. But at least we’re soldiers, and we volunteered for this!”

“She’ll stay on the Falcon, then,” said Ben.

Luke raised his hands placatingly. “Let’s try to get off to a good start, shall we?”

“We _would_ , if _Kylo_ here hadn’t…” Poe broke off at Ben’s furious look. Even Finn was giving Poe the evil eye to shut him up.

“His name’s _Ben!”_ said Leia automatically.

“You know what? I can’t blame Ben for wanting somebody on board that actually likes him,” said Luke loudly. Ben’s head snapped around, surprised at support from that quarter. Leia cringed at the implication. Luke had seen Ben’s loneliness. She hadn’t. Why were her conversations with Ben so clumsy?

“I should keep my mouth shut more often, shouldn’t I?” she said.

“Yeah, Ma, I’m all grown up now,” muttered Ben tiredly. “You get to let me make my own stupid mistakes. At least they’re new stupid mistakes.”

Mistakes that Spikey would suffer most for, Leia thought, and bit her tongue. She stuffed the thought out of sight before Ben could take it for an attack.

“That’s growth. Growth is _good!”_ said Luke heartily. Ben groaned, and somehow the tension of the moment was broken.

Spikey came jangling back, chitarra slung over one shoulder and a small bag over the other. She took up station next to Ben as though she belonged there. His loyal retainer, Leia thought, and suppressed a sigh.

“Shit then. Let’s go,” said Spikey into the silence.

“Let’s go, all _right!_ Who’s piloting first?” said Ben. Poe and Luke charged up the ramp in a race for the cockpit, BB8 and R2D2 tweedling excitedly at their heels.

“Come on, you’ll love the Falcon!” said Ben, taking Spikey’s hand and dragging her up behind them.

Leia shrugged at Finn. “I thought he hated the _Falcon.”_

“Can I say, “I have a bad feeling about this’?” asked Finn.

“It’s not an exclusive Skywalker line. But you’ll say it a lot if you spend much time around us,” said Leia, cracking a smile. “Most of our adventures start out like crap. I don’t know why I even bother making plans any more.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	35. All Aboard the Millennium Falcon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On courage. Speaking is hard, and so is silence.
> 
> “Oh, stars, I feel it sometimes, what I did! Like there’s nothing else, and I’ll be living in that black hole forever, seeing his pain. I wish I could run from it. Or turn back time, make it so it never happened. But I can’t, all I can do is say I’m sorry. And I don’t even know how to do that.”
> 
> * * *

Later that day Leia was sitting in the copilot’s seat next to Luke, though there was nothing left to do besides look at hyperspace until they got close to Snoke’s base.

“That was not as bad as it could have been,” said Luke into the comfortable silence between them. Leia nodded, smiling to herself. She had too much in her heart to say any more. Luke knew, anyway. Both of them had hoped for Ben’s return. Seeing him like this, whole and free of Snoke’s influence, was more than they had dared hope.

Ben came into the cockpit just then. He moved like Rey now, Leia thought. Alert and self-contained, like a desert creature. Unsure whether he was welcome, but determined to join them anyway. She smiled at him, admiring the way he filled the space. Her son, a man now.

“How’s the old bird going?” Ben asked Luke, leaning over the pilot’s console. Fanning the flames of peace, Leia thought.

“Faster than ever,” grinned Luke. “When we were fixing her up to get off Ahch-to, Rey made some changes. She was desperate to get moving. Do you want to see?” He started to get up, no doubt intending to show Ben Rey’s modifications.

“Uh. Okay,” said Ben after a pause, and went with Luke to the engine room. Leia smiled to herself again. He’d never enjoyed helping Han fix things. But she read his willingness to follow Luke now as an effort to get along. And…she didn’t mean to snoop, but she could tell he was eager to see anything Rey had done or touched.

What was his relationship to Rey, exactly? And where did Spikey fit in? Rey had said Ben thought of her as a kind of pet. Leia could tell Spikey didn’t want to be part of this adventure, and only loyalty to Ben had persuaded her to come along. She was, Leia thought, a bit of a coward. At the same time, Leia was aware of Ben’s constant anxiety about Rey, like a sustained note straining at the edge of her hearing. Spikey must know too, surely?

Before dinner, they all sat in the crew lounge discussing their plans, the Galaxy map glowing between them. Luke and Ben were both concerned about the fact the Knights of Ren had created lightsabers since Ben last saw them. It was difficult to know how much of a threat that would pose, or how much training they might have had, and they took a long time hashing it out. Leia could see Spikey didn’t want to think about any of it. Instead she busied herself preparing food and making cups of tea for everyone.

“Do we have any Wookiee snacks?” asked Leia.

“Sorry, I threw them out,” said Spikey. “They were so stale.”

“What?” asked Leia, outraged. They _always_ ate Wookiee snacks on the _Falcon._ To Leia, they were the very taste of adventure.

Luke started laughing. “I looked in our storage lockers and somebody’s filled them with, um, real food,” he said, looking at Spikey. She looked back at him nervously, probably wondering if she was about get told off.

“We’ve got hors d’oeuvres,” she said, backing out of the room. She came back a minute later with a tray of small steaming lumps of something savoury. Ben unfolded himself from the corner he’d crammed himself into and reached quickly for the food, giving Spikey an unexpectedly sweet smile. Leia shook her head, amazed.

The food was good too. Maybe it was true that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, she thought. Not a course she could have succeeded in. The only part of cooking Leia liked was the knives. A woman with a good sharp knife could hold her own in the world, she always thought.

Once they’d finished eating the discussion continued. Leia realised that somehow she and Luke had ended up together in one corner, Finn and Poe in another, leaving Ben alone in his corner, a frown gathering on his face. Spikey came in, and Leia saw her eyes scanning around the room, sizing up the situation. She went to sit next to Ben, and the tightness left his face. He put an arm around Spikey and she curled into him, falling asleep as the conversation droned on. Leia had sometimes imagined how Rey would look curled into the crook of Ben’s arm. She’d have been paying attention to the attack plans, she thought.

Leia and Spikey shared one bunkroom, but some time during the night Spikey left and Leia was woken by Luke coming in from where he’d been sleeping in the crew lounge.

“Mind if I take the top bunk?” he asked. “Ben was having bad dreams and came into the crew lounge for company. Spikey followed him and started telling him a story, and now I can’t sleep. Finn and Poe’s stuff is all over their bunkroom. I’m not even going to try to find my way across their floor in the dark.”

Later on her way to use the refresher she peeked into the crew lounge and saw them, curled up together chastely on the bench seat, Ben clutching Spikey like he used to hold his bedtime soft toys. Leia rolled her eyes and went back to bed. Ben still needed to grow up, she thought.

So the days passed, somewhat awkwardly. Poe and Ben were prickly with each other, but Finn seemed able to step in and appeal to Poe’s sense of humour before things turned nasty. Ben seemed to trust Finn too. Leia overheard them talking about the actions Finn had seen, fighting the First Order. Finn was fascinated with Ben’s descriptions of life among the upper echelons of the First Order, which he’d seen only at a distance.

“When this is over, I have some ideas about where you can find the Finalizer,” Ben told Finn. “If the New Republic will lend you the ships, I’d like to pay Hux a surprise visit.”

Ben told him about the Hux family’s attempts to have him assassinated. Leia listened, trying to imagine Ben finding his way in that world of poisonous backstabbers. No wonder he’d had to wear a mask, she thought.

“Short version: They were all jerks,” Spikey said, sitting to one side noodling on her chitarra.

“Is that why you weren’t afraid of me?” asked Ben, unexpectedly.

“Yeah. I hated all of them about equally the same. I had no idea you were supposed to be the worst of the lot.”

When she was alone with Ben, Leia broached the subject of learning how to hide from the Force.

“Rey found something in the Jedi Temple that could be useful. Luke’s learned it too. Would you consider letting him teach it to you?” She waited, watching Ben anxiously. He frowned, but nodded eventually.

“Maybe you should be there too. I don’t want to screw things up with Luke. You know, old habits, misunderstandings, all that,” he said.

So they sat together uncomfortably in the cockpit away from the others, learning Rey’s vanishing trick.

“I used to worry too much about how to teach,” Luke began. “Like there was some established Jedi way that Yoda did things, and that was the only right way to do it. I’m not going to do that. I’m going to show you the way Rey showed me.”

Ben nodded. “That might be, uh, less annoying.” Luke gave him a hard look, and Ben bobbed his head. “Sorry.”

“Ugh, no, you’re right! I was trying to be Yoda, and Yoda was annoying!” said Luke, laughing suddenly. “He annoyed me, anyways.”

Together they looked at the materials Luke had brought back from Ahch-to. Ben picked up the technique as fast as Rey had.

“I have a thing too,” Ben said shyly, when they felt they’d done enough. (Leia noticed Luke let Ben decide how long the lesson should last). “This is a way of hiding your thoughts that I learned while I was at the First Order Palace. It was some protection against Snoke.”

Luke listened carefully and both men went into meditation together. Leia could feel the link between them, Ben feeding Luke his knowledge. As often happened, some of the knowledge seemed to soak into her too, going into that well of Force she never touched.

She’d resisted it all her life. Unlike her brother, she’d never seen Darth Vader redeemed as a loving father. She had only ever experienced her father’s cruelty. Maybe it was unfair to blame the Force alone for twisting him into the monster she had known, but that was the way she felt about the Force: something too dangerous to be trusted. It informed much of what she did, but she avoided calling on it consciously.

They were headed to the black heart of the Galaxy, and Leia saw with pride how everyone tended the fragile peace they were building. She noticed that whenever she and Ben were together, the others would clear out to allow them to talk. At one point their eyes met and their lips quirked up at the same time, and they started to laugh about it.

“They’re a bit obvious, aren’t they?” said Ben. Leia reached over and patted his hand, still smiling at him.

“We don’t need to talk if you don’t want to,” she said, and her smile faded. “I mean, we know what you did, and I think I understand why you thought you had to do it. The only thing…One day I wish I could know if there’s anything I could have done differently. Even though it’s too late to change it.” She pondered a moment. “It’s like I want to know what mistakes I need to beat myself up for. For what little use that’ll be.” She snorted to herself. “However I failed you, I want to apologise.”

“I should be the one apologising. But I don’t know where to begin. There aren’t words big enough,” said Ben softly. “Oh, stars, I feel it sometimes, what I did! Like there’s nothing else, and I’ll be living in that black hole forever, seeing his pain. I wish I could run from it. Or turn back time, make it so it never happened. But I can’t, all I can do is say I’m sorry. And I don’t even know how to do that.”

Leia nodded. “It feels that way sometimes. I don’t know the right language either.”

They sat in silence for a while, Leia massaging the sinews of his hand. It seemed too thin, she thought. Like all of him.

“So that’s it? We just move on and don’t discuss it?” said Ben eventually.

“Maybe we’re not ready. I want you to know that I trust you. Does that help?” said Leia, feeling as though she was grabbing thoughts and words at random. She didn’t know how to move forward, only that she wanted to. Ben just looked at her, eyebrows peaking in that unbearable look of hurt appeal that she’d never known how to answer.

“Looking back is only going to make us angry and sad, right now. Another time maybe. If we look forward we won’t hurt each other. The future could be _incredible,_ Ben!”

Ben moved over and put his arms around her, laying his cheek on her hair. She still couldn’t believe how big he’d grown.

“You’re such an optimist,” he said, and pulled away to look down at her. He was smiling tentatively. She answered with a smile of her own, though she could feel tears pricking her eyes.

“My brave mother,” he said.

Then the tears did spill over. Softly her son stroked her cheeks, wiping them away.

 

 

 

 


	36. Page and Knight

Kylo prowled around the _Millennium Falcon’s_ slightly grungy bunkroom, nerves on edge. In less than an hour he’d be hitting the ground on what they’d come to call Snoke’s Ball of Misery. It was time to suit up. Part of him thought the whole venture was insane. Three Force-users against Snoke and the Knights of Ren, plus whoever else might be there. He had trained and sparred with the Knights enough to know their limits, and he did not fear them. But Snoke? For so long Snoke’s power over him had seemed beyond question. Even now, though Kylo had broken free of his psychological hold, he had not confronted him face to face, as they were about to do.

When he’d led the Knights of Ren they’d done similar missions as a small attack team striking at New Republic outposts. The odds against them had seemed impossible sometimes, and he’d have moments of doubt, confronted with such overwhelming numbers. _Are we really doing this?_ he’d think, and then wonder if the other Knights had the same fears. The only answer was to attack with more passion, more fury, before his own disbelief could undo him. It had always proved to be enough: in combat the Force cut easily through the tapestry of violence, unravelling the threads that bound the lives and purposes of their opponents .

Luke had told him how Anakin used to take on those sort of odds all the time, either with Obi-wan or with his padawan Ahsoka.

“Yoda told me so many stories about how they used to tear through masses of of battle droids while pursuing General Grievous or holding off Asajj Ventress,” Luke had said.

“They had clone troopers too, I thought,” Kylo said.

“They didn’t stand up to the Force though,” said Luke. “They ended up being cannon fodder a lot of the time. It wasn’t good.”

“What about Leia? Why is she coming? She doesn’t fight.”

Leia had chipped in from where she was pretending to snooze on the lounge.

“I used to. And I know I have to be part of this. I do _have_ the Force, you know. I just haven’t seen a reason to use it. Yet.”

“I don’t want you getting into…” began Kylo.

“Something tells me I need to be there.”

“I hope that ‘something’ isn’t Snoke. He’s good at planting suggestions like that,” said Kylo bitterly.

“You think he’s leading me by the nose? No, meeting Snoke is something I want to do,” said Leia firmly. And that had been the end of the discussion.

Now it was time to suit up for the final jump to Snoke’s Misery. Kylo was just prodding a pile of unfamiliar armour on the floor when a knock came at the door. He easily sensed Spikey, and opened the door to her small, fierce embrace.

He stroked her hair, which had grown out into a soft pelt, delightful to scratch with his fingers. Once again she ran her hands over him.

“Ah, you’re still so thin,” she said, squeezing him tighter. “And now you’re really going to fight Snoke and rescue Rey?”

“Yes!” he said. She grinned up at him excitedly and hit him on the back before reaching up to kiss him. A lover’s last kiss before he went to his death, he thought angrily. She was so sentimental, she was bound to start crying and imagining his funeral. He peeled her off and stepped back. Spikey froze for a moment and stepped back too, giving him a searching look.

“Ah,” she said. Nothing more. She picked up the armoured pressure suits and started sorting through the pieces. “Leia forgot how tall you were, I think. Let’s see though, these should fit…” She was talking too fast and loud. Kylo was still casting around for something to smooth things over, but came up blank.

“Here, try these on. Under-armour suit.” She held up a black body-glove.

“Huh. I thought I’d have to wear white or something. What a relief,” he said, trying to pass over the uncomfortable moment. Spikey stepped forward to help him out of his overalls and into the new clothes. She’d resumed the shield of impersonal intimacy she’d had when she was his servant and did this every day. Now he _did_ want to kiss her, but she radiated aloofness.

“Surcoat,” she said. It had latches and seals, different from the belts and buckles he’d worn as a Knight of Ren.

“Black?” asked Kylo.

“Who cares? Can’t hurt to confuse people a bit,” she said briefly, and kneaded the airseals tight.

She reached into the bottom of the bag and pulled out greaves and vambraces, clasping them expertly on to his arms and legs.

“Old fashioned, but I’m guessing you want to present an image. Boots, here.” She pulled them onto his feet, clipped them onto the suit and did up the pressure seals. Outside, they could hear Luke swearing, and guessed he was having difficulty getting into his armour. They shared a quick smile.

The cabin had a mirror. Kylo looked at himself. A warrior again. He neither looked like a Jedi nor like a Knight of Ren. Somewhere in between. For that, he was glad. Spikey handed him the helmet and he tried it on for a moment to check the seal, then took it off.

“Fit okay? Can you move?” Spikey asked.

He stepped and spun about the room to try it out. Paradoxically, under the tight costume his muscles seemed to loosen and ease up. He felt full of fight. Spikey looked at him admiringly and clapped him on the shoulders when he stood still again, as she had often done before.

Somehow they ended up face to face, holding hands. This time he pulled her into his arms and leaned down to kiss her. She was right: he might die soon. A lovers’ last kiss was almost mandatory.

Spikey stepped out of the embrace, looking offended. “I know you’re crazy about Rey,” she muttered, turning away. “I need to help the others now.”

He followed her to the door, laying a hand on her shoulder.

“I might never see you again.” Or he might come back with Rey in his arms, his true beloved. Either way it was a pretty shitty deal for Spikey. No wonder his mother had been mad about him asking Spikey along.

“You’re confusing me,” she said, and shrugged him off. He grabbed her before she could get through the door, and she turned.

“I can’t be your boyfriend,” he said. She nodded stonily. “But I love you,” he said. There, he’d said it. It felt like the worst time to say it, but if not now, when?

“That’s still confusing,” she said, after a long pause.

“It’s just that Rey and I share a connection. It’s like nothing else…For a while I was keeping her alive. Along the Force-bond we have. I was helping her resist Snoke. I feel like I know her better than I’ve ever known anyone in my life,” he said. He was almost babbling.

“You want to save her more than anything, I guess,” said Spikey. “All those months you were hunting her, and you thought you hated her, but then you talked to her…it was kind of funny, actually. I knew how you felt about her before you did, and you would have been so angry if I’d told you!”

“Yes. But after you left, I missed you. I still….” He pulled her into his arms. She rested against him for a moment and then stepped out, sighing.

“I’ll find my own way. I love you too, Ben, but I still don’t want to be your sidekick. And that’s all I’d be, if I stayed with you. You were born for this life, and so was Rey. Fighting, and all that. Me, I hate it.” She suddenly looked more cheerful. “Maybe I’m more like your page, though! Like knights used to have in the old days. Until this battle is over.”

Kylo smiled down at her.

“I like that.”

Spikey turned and slipped out the door then. A moment later he heard her saying cheerily, “Now, do you need a hand with those boots?” to Luke. Putting on an act. Kylo could sense that she was holding back tears. It was a good thing Luke didn’t believe in prying into people’s minds, he thought.

And then it was time. Everyone apart from the droids somehow crowded into the cockpit around Poe, who was at the controls. One moment they were speeding through a dusty murk of nebulous gas near the Galactic centre, the next they were sailing through shivering, oddly-bent blue veils of hyperspace.

“That looks weird,” said Leia.

“It’s because we’re so close to the Galactic black hole. That thing’s a monster. It throws everything out of whack,” said Poe. “Here goes, we’re back in space in three…two…one….boom! Whoops!”

“Whoops!” because while the _Millennium Falcon_ had arrived at rest relative to Snoke’s Misery, it was spinning like a leaf in a whirlpool. With the ship’s dampers on, they couldn’t really feel it, but the starscape flashing past the viewport was dizzying.

Worse than the spinning starscape was the sudden weight of the Force. Kylo felt it skewer him. Leia put her hands up to her head with an expression of shock, and Luke grunted with surprise.

It was a good thing Poe was flying, because he wasn’t affected. His hands moved with lightning speed over the controls until the ship slowed to a halt. A few more adjustments and the ship drifted lightly onto the planetoid’s surface.

“What a dump,” said Finn. He was right, Kylo thought. It was just a rock really, oddly polished and eerily lit by a smudgy soup of star-stuff and gas. They were on the opposite side to the black hole, so it was invisible to them, but they could see the Galaxy dimly above them through concentric rings of distortion. There was a sense that everything around them was being pulled apart by vast forces.

“Snoke’s First Order Palace was on a nice planet,” said Spikey plaintively. “Complete luxury. Yet _this_ is where he’d rather live. The dag on the arse-end of the Galaxy. What a loser.” She sniffed dismissively, but Kylo could see her hands shaking where they rested on the back of Poe’s seat.

“Lucky you can’t feel the Force,” said Kylo. “This place is full of it. That’s why he’s here.”

“Not the Force as I know it,” said Luke. “This feels wrong.”

“He’s been doing something to it,” snarled Leia, sounding personally affronted. Kylo wondered, not for the first time, how strong her Force sensitivity really was.

On the planetoid itself everything was very still. Just a few shed-like hangars built into the greyish rock, with the noses of four or five small spaceships sticking out. Long-range starfighters and light couriers, Kylo judged, from what he could see. A couple of ancient comms and surveillance towers surrounded the landing pad, their tops looking strangely shredded. No air and no life.

The _Falcon’s_ comms panel showed nothing but snow and a fierce rush of static.

“Not easy to talk to anyone from here,” observed Poe. “I’m not getting any alarm signals though, so that’s good.”

“Snoke used to send his hologram to talk to people,” said Kylo. “But not often. Projecting it out of here would have been a massive drain.” It explained why Snoke had been so unavailable a lot of the time, he thought.

He could feel Snoke’s presence now, and the Knights of Ren. And there, faint but unmistakeable, Rey, shining like a beacon to him.

“Feel that?” he asked. “She’s still alive!” He loosened his lightsaber in its sheath, suddenly desperate to get out and break down the walls between them. “She’s still….light! He hasn’t turned her!”

Luke and Leia nodded, needing no explanation.

 _Rey, Rey! I’m here! We’re coming to get you!_ he called through the Force. Nothing. He took a deep breath, released it slowly, centring his power. Concentrate on the task at hand, he told himself.

“I feel Snoke near, too,” said Luke, looking grim. Kylo thought Leia looked positively bloodthirsty. How she wanted to get her hands on Snoke!

“Hide yourselves, everyone,” Kylo reminded them, pulling his own sense of himself around him in an impenetrable shield. The others were the same. He could barely sense them, and he doubted Snoke would either.

“Well, this isn’t winning any wars. Let’s get moving,” said Finn.

They filed out and found their helmets. Finn and Poe picked up a bag of explosives each. R2D2 and BB8 joined them. Spikey checked the helmet seals and shook hands with them all, gravely wishing them luck. The outer hatch opened, and they stepped through the ship’s force field into the airless landscape of Snoke’s Misery.

Once outside, Kylo flexed his legs. There was artificial gravity. It would probably be set in one plane only, rather than pulling towards the tiny planetoid’s core.

Poe and Finn gestured in a wide circle around the landing field to indicate how they would set the charges around the perimeter. Leia pointed to suggest they try to put them under the surface as well, and they nodded and headed off towards the close horizon, which was almost lost in a haze of light: the super-energised particles shooting up from the black hole below them. If they stepped too far out of this little landing area, they’d be fried. BB8 trundled after them.

Kylo, Luke and Leia made their way to the nearest hangar. It was unpressurised, and the little starfighter parked inside was connected up directly to an access door in the hangar wall. There was no other doorway, so they’d have to enter the base through the spaceship.

Kylo used the Force to leap onto the roof of the starfighter, then helped Luke and Leia lift R2D2 up as well. R2D2 found the space hatch on top of the ship. His lights flashed with evil glee and he set to work on the hatch’s dataport. After a moment the hatch opened, silent in the vacuum.

Kylo and Luke lowered R2D2 into the cramped access tube and they all dropped in after him, landing in a narrow passageway sandwiched between the engines and the munitions. Once through the atmospheric field, they could breathe and hear again. Taking off his helmet, Kylo even recognised the smell of his former friends, the Knights of Ren: testosterone and old socks. Leia pulled a face.

“Does the Dark Side not believe in deodorant?” she hissed. Luke snorted.

Silence. Impossible to tell whether they’d triggered any alarms. Perhaps in some control room nearby, bells were clanging and lights flashing. Luke gave R2D2 a quizzical look, and got an uncertain twitter in return.

“He doesn’t think the hatch was alarmed, but he’s not sure,” whispered Luke. He opened an inner door and they made their way silently into the cockpit, clipping their helmets to their belts as they went. R2D2 gave the hatch mechanism a final exploratory poke with one of his data connectors and then hurried after them.

The main entry hatch was clamped into an access-way leading to the interior of Snoke’s hideout. R2D2 explored the opening mechanism with one of his tools, and reported that it wasn’t locked, but when they opened it, a signal would definitely go out along the base’s fibre networks.

“Can you block that signal?” asked Luke.

R2D2 gave a smug purr to say he’d already done it. The door rolled open.

They found themselves in a long featureless tunnel of some slightly translucent material, almost circular in cross-section apart from the floor, which was flat. Everything was evenly lit by some light source within the ceiling. After fifty metres, the corridor curved slightly and branched in two.

“The left side looks more worn,” said Luke after inspecting both tunnels for a while. They took the left turn.

More curves, and then the corridor split into three; side corridors were visible joining two of the branches. Some of the corridors were merely round tunnels. Two more branches looped away and down at an unnerving angle, smooth and slippery, and there was a round hole in the ceiling: another tunnel, leading straight up for a short distance before curving out of sight.

“This is a maze,” whispered Leia. She looked disgusted by the senselessness of it. Kylo bent to the floor and looked along it. He could see light scratches on the floor of the middle branch. He gestured for the others to follow, and they went that way.

“I don’t think this is man-made,” said Leia after a while. “It looks like it’s been tunnelled by one of those space slugs like that one we found in an asteroid field once. Snoke’s just adapted it for himself.”

They continued silently, choosing the corridors that were obviously shaped for human use. Slight scuffs and scratches on the floor and walls revealed which ones were more frequently travelled, and finding their path wasn’t difficult, until they came to a place where their tunnel was bisected by a vertical tunnel that made a gap in the entire floor in front of them. They would have to jump across.

“Can you make that jump?” Luke whispered to Leia, who was hanging back listening to R2D2.

“I don’t think so. But R2D2 says there’s a control panel here somewhere. It must be hidden in the walls, he says.”

“I can definitely see one on the other side,” said Kylo, pointing to a box moulded against the wall on the other side. “It probably activates a force field so you can simply walk across.”

Just then a spy drone flew out of a tunnel behind Leia. Its lenses flared as it caught sight of the intruders. Leia whirled around and nailed it with a single shot of her blaster. Too late. A shrill bell sounded from one of the tunnels nearby, and Kylo could hear the insectoid rattle of battle droid feet. Leia backed towards Kylo and Luke, but it was clear she couldn’t cross the hole in the floor. They needed to turn on the force-field.

Luke and Kylo launched across the gap in a Force-leap. It was a mistake. Something seemed to grip them and pull them down into the hole, as though gravity had doubled while they were in mid-air. In one of those lightning moves that only the Force made possible, Kylo seized Luke’s arm with one hand and tried to catch hold of the curved lip of the shaft, but its polished surface offered no purchase. Leia’s scream followed them as they fell through a strange half-light, bumped and flung from side to side. The tunnel dived and looped in smooth curves towards the planetoid’s interior. After what seemed like a long time, their nightmare ride slowed and they tumbled into a large space. The dim light that seemed to suffuse the whole planet showed them a chamber with many openings like the one from which they’d fallen. The uneven floor held puddles of unknown depth, and water or some other liquid dripped from the ceiling.

Kylo drew his lightsaber, and Luke followed suit. They stood up, testing their limbs.

“Nothing broken. Just bruises,” said Kylo softly. “You?”

“Same,” said Luke, and then motioned Kylo to silence. They could hear sounds coming down the tunnel behind them. Blaster fire, and shouts.

“Leia had a blaster,” said Kylo. But those didn’t sound like her shouts.

“I think they know we’re here,” said Luke.

“Come on!” said Kylo. “We can cut footholds in these chutes with our lightsabers!” He started to run back up the tunnel they’d arrived in, but Luke stopped him.

“Whatever’s happening up there will be long finished by the time we get out, whether she’s been taken prisoner or fought her way free. There may be people posted to watch that that exit. It’d be better to come up through a different one.” Luke read Kylo’s impatience and added, “I know, I did the same thing enough times. Rushing off to save people. I’m older and sneakier now. Trust me.”

Kylo found that he did, and wondered when he’d stopped seeing Luke as a cautious old fool. His own Force senses warned him, too, that the tunnel they’d fallen down was the wrong one to use now, even if they could climb it.

The muffled sounds of battle died away above them. Kylo felt sick, wondering what had happened to his mother there.

Luke and Kylo sized up the different tunnels leading upwards out of the chamber. They pulled off their gauntlets and felt for air currents. Before they had made their decision, they became aware of another sound, a strange rustling and clicking coming from several of the tunnels leading down. It grew louder and louder. Kylo instinctively moved to stand back to back with Luke, and they both waited with sabres drawn.

Moments later a huge, pale horror shot out of one of the lower tunnels like a toothy piston, followed by two more. They were horrible worm-like things with armoured segments, big enough to easily fill the tunnels they burst out from. Although they seemed blind, their rock-crushing jaws bore down on Luke and Kylo with uncanny accuracy.

 _“This_ isn’t how I die!” yelled Kylo, and leaped to meet the first one. He heard Luke give a battle yell of his own and saw Luke’s green blade weaving a counterpoint to his own attack.

All that training, so many years ago. How he’d hated it! Now, fighting by Luke’s side rather than sparring against him, they made parallel lines of deadly power, each filling the spaces left by the other. Even in the middle of the danger and fear, with teeth and scales and green ichor flying all around them, Kylo was seized by the sublimity of it. What a glorious thing it was to fight like this! They fitted together so perfectly, spinning and dancing and dealing death with the wide gestures of a bride throwing flowers.

Not that death came easily. The space-slugs were so huge that their lightsabers could only chop off one claw or a few teeth at a time. It was a long matter of slowly pecking off the slugs’ natural weaponry until they could no longer attack, all the while dodging their murderously weighted hammer-blows.

Finally the writhing bodies lay still, or at least merely twitched insensibly. Green ooze tinged the standing water and fragments of the slugs’ armour littered the floor. Both Kylo and Luke were panting and leaning on each other. They sheathed their lightsabers and stood, listening. Far away, there was more faint rustling from the lower tunnels.

“Let’s not wait around. That tunnel felt slightly warmer,” said Kylo, pointing to one of the ones that angled up. Luke nodded his agreement, and they set off, pausing to slash footholds in the tunnel where its slippery surface grew too steep. They would serve as guides if they needed to retrace their steps, too.

Reaching the inhabited levels would take a while, Kylo thought. This way, like the others they’d seen, was a maze of branching and curving tunnels, and they had only the faintest of guides in the warm air currents that wafted down sometimes from the upper reaches.

After a long time they heard the sound of distant blaster fire again. They were passing under a vertical shaft in the ceiling of the tunnel they were following, and the noises came from above.

“Oh, kark it. We’re just wasting time!” said Luke. “Let’s see if we can use the Force a bit more. Nobody would be expecting us to pop up this way!”

“What, jump all the way up there?” Kylo looked into the faintly lit shaft above them. Impossible to tell how far it went.

“Ben, listen. That was a great fight we had down there against those space slugs. But you’re holding back. I sense more power in you than what you’re using.”

Kylo backed away, almost physically threatened by the thought. Luke wanted him to unleash…what? His years at the Jedi Academy had been filled by one constant refrain: Control, control, control. He couldn’t control the Force the way he was supposed to. He hurt people and he broke things, and his childhood had been spent in a haze of shame for the mistakes he made. Everyone at the Academy mistrusted him, and he’d grown to hate Luke’s look of disappointment when he’d failed, yet again, to rein in his powers.

Luke seemed to read his mind. “I’m sorry, Ben. We none of us knew what to do about you. You were so strong in the Force. But now is not the time to worry about controlling it. Forget everything I ever said. If you have to blow this rock to pieces to get to Snoke, well, that’s what we need.”

“I don’t know what I could do,” said Kylo in a low voice.

“Do what you _want,_ Ben.”

Kylo closed his eyes for a moment and reached out with the Force, trying to see beyond the worm-riddled rock walls around them. Rey was still there, achingly close. He could feel her direction now, like seeing the sun through closed eyelids. He could also see where he needed to go next, knew the Force would show him the way. Blindly he reached out and took Luke’s wrist. Luke gripped his wrist back.

“See it?” he asked Luke. The way they needed to go.

“Yes. Now I can. Let’s go!”

Both of them flexed their knees and leaped up, up through the shaft above them, kicking off the sides and flying higher and higher as though for a few seconds gravity had no hold on them. The tunnel levelled out and they ran side by side, jinking and weaving their way through the branching corridors with no hesitation. Riding the Force like a river that would show him the right way.

There was no hiding from Snoke now, though. Such profligate use of the Force right under his nose could not go unnoticed. Kylo felt a familiar sense of malice awakening somewhere in front of him.

“I feel it too,” muttered Luke at his side.

A few more leaps, and they were a level higher. The sound of weapons fire was louder.

At last they raced around a corner and into a big warehouse chamber. It was full of battle droids — in fact, it seemed to be a storage area for battle droids. They could see the big racks where the droids usually hung, awaiting action.

They had plenty of action now. A dozen of them were firing at targets at the far end of the warehouse, where somebody was presumably sheltering behind piles of machinery and broken droids. Without pausing to think, Luke and Kylo threw themselves on the backs of the active droids before them. Their lightsabers rose and fell with blinding speed. Kylo felt so charged with power that the droids seemed to disintegrate at the merest touch.

In a few minutes it was over, and the warehouse was still.

“Who’s there?” asked Luke, walking over to the pile of blackened machinery in the far corner. Poe and Finn rose out of the wreckage.

“Man, that was good timing! I thought we were done for!” said Finn. The two men jumped over the twisted metal that had protected them. Luke clapped them both on the shoulders, delighted to see them. Kylo hung back, feeling strangely shy. It still felt as though the power crackling in him might come loose and hurt them.

“Why are you here?” asked Luke. “You were meant to plant those charges and go back to the _Falcon.”_

“We figured those explosives would be more use if we planted them under the surface. We saw these tunnels leading underground, and BB8 hacked a way in….” said Poe. 

  
“Then we got lost,” said Finn. “There’s tunnels everywhere!”

“Then we got targeted by a security drone, and while we were running away we ran into this droid park…” said Poe.

“How did you survive that? It looks like there were dozens of them!” asked Luke.

“BB8 hacked into their sensor array and reversed their sensory data so they saw everything in mirror image,” said Poe. “Most of them destroyed themselves or each other, doing everything backwards.” Poe was grinning with pride at BB8, who was rappelling himself down from one of the storage racks on the ceiling.

“It was a mess though. Shots firing every which way. The survivors were just getting their act together to attack us properly when you showed up.”

“Well I guess Snoke and his friends will know we’re here by now. Which way, Ben?” asked Luke.

Kylo drew on the Force. No question about Snoke’s attention now: there it was, filled with cold rage, and searching for them. And Rey, awake now. Like heat on his skin. No mistaking which way to go.

Lost in the world of the Force, he couldn’t speak aloud, but he waved the others to follow him and set off at a dead run, pounding through the corridors of Snoke’s hideout.

_Rey, I’m here!_

_I know, I know! Snoke knows too, he’s sent the Knights to look for you. We’re in the throne room…I’m pretending I’m asleep still. I won’t move until I see you. The drugs are wearing off. If somebody cuts me loose, I can move…Thank the stars you came!_

_Of course I came. I love you!_ he shouted in his mind. He felt a jolt of something from her in return: acceptance, gratitude, pride, joy and yes, love. He raised his arms as though to fly. He was nearly flying, flying through the labyrinth, straight into her arms. Behind him, the others coasted on the broad wake of Force flung up by his passage, legs churning like runners in a dream.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	37. Rey and Snoke: Last Dance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey loses herself in dreams, but she knows what's coming for her. She's waited long enough.
> 
> * * *

I hung, half dreaming, fixed to the wall in Snoke’s throne room. He’d made a little niche I could fit into so I was almost like part of the building. An icon in the Church of Snoke. The door to the crystal room was ajar and I could feel the power bleeding through. I had become convinced that something was struggling to be born in there. Something that wanted me with a mad, blind craving. I would be a lightning rod, if it could once get me into its focus.

There must be some reason Snoke was so unwilling to go in there himself. Despite his threats, he hadn’t tortured me so my spirit jumped out of my body, leaving it for him to use. Either it wasn’t really possible, or he knew that no matter who went in there, the Force would enter them, hollow them out and wear them like a glove.

Snoke sat on his throne, droning on about the rites of some alien species.

“… Like so many others, their creation myths tell of a cosmic egg. The way they describe it, it’s not unlike this place we inhabit now, our round, smooth little planetoid, so full of power and potential…”

I twisted, trying to get comfortable in my bonds. It was coming to the end of my shift. Soon I could go back to my room. They would give me more drugs to keep me under control. But now, near to the end of my day, I was as close to regaining my own powers as I could be.

A rustle of movement from the Knights standing guard. They knew. They couldn’t drug me as much as they’d like to, if they hoped to keep me alive. They feared me.

“Not comfortable? Perhaps you would feel better if you could move,” said Snoke. “I’ll have the Knights untie you, if you’ll do some small practical things in return. Light the incense at the altar. There is a ritual dance you can do that will free your mind even as it frees up your limbs.”

I couldn’t be bothered looking at him. I had mapped every scruple of my hatred onto his face until I couldn’t bear to see it any more.

“I could hurt you, you know,” he’s say sometimes, raising his hands. “if I weren’t so merciful.”

“You know and I know that I have to do this of my own free will, if I do it at all,” I said. “Fear and belief aren’t the same thing.”

And it was true. The starving, the brutality, the Force tortures he’d inflicted on me at the beginning were just the opening steps of his dance. Laying out the dance floor, so to speak. To achieve what he planned, he must make me his partner in the act. Whatever lies he was telling me, that much was clear.

How long had he been trying to persuade me? The walls of my room were scored with many, many marks, tallying up the days. It must have been months.

I spent the endless hours making up stories about my friends, long sagas full of romance and intrigue and adventure. Finn doing heroic deeds with the help of the former stormtroopers who flocked to follow his lead. Rescuing a woman who fought by his side until they settled down together with Poe to tend an orchard on Yavin. Leia outwitting the plots of her enemies and bringing peace to the Galaxy, Chewie going home at last and raising a lively, loving family on Kashykk, Spikey crowned with fame, singing to an adoring crowd. Happy endings for all. Nothing Snoke would care about. Every time I was tempted by Snoke’s crazy dreams of power, I remembered all the good people I’d met. They were real, and they had dreams too.

I wished I could think of Kylo more, but all too often I’d find Snoke, coiled like a serpent along the Force-bond. So I kept my thoughts of Kylo close to me, small and quiet. Imagining things we’d said and things we might say. I wanted to imagine so much more, but I couldn’t risk Snoke finding a way to see such thoughts. He would defile them. He already tried to feed me vile and sick distortions of who Kylo was, claiming he knew him better than I. Those visions had enough truth in them to shake me. Kylo had a lot of blood on his hands: that much, I knew, was no lie.

Snoke talked on. I dreamed I was walking through a forest where the trees bowed their heads to me and the flowers turned their faces to follow me. They knew my name.

“We could do that,” said Snoke when I awoke, still in the throne room. “Everything would burst into bloom as you passed, hailing you in my name. I like that. Imagine that all of creation could know you and love you. You, the harbinger of my rule.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” I asked. Snoke gave me a mad, bright smile and said nothing. I went back to my own thoughts.

_My name is Rey and I come from Jakku. I broke a man’s beliefs once, and afterwards he came to me to be healed. I healed him from the lies that injured his soul. When I see him again, he will be whole._

And then suddenly he was there! My beloved! Here, in Snoke’s terrible stronghold! Even with my sore and blunted senses, I knew him in the Force. I couldn’t risk sending out a call, with Snoke so near me. But I knew he was _here!_

Snoke had sensed something too. He broke off from his reading and looked at me. I concealed my thoughts, and he frowned, puzzled. Casting around with the Force. I knew how well Kylo could hide himself, and I waited, my heart beating faster than it had in weeks.

Distantly, a shrill alarm sounded. Snoke straightened up on his throne and stared at me. I could feel him prying into my thoughts. I concentrated on the feel of a bird’s feet when it perches on your hand and allows you to scratch its neck-feathers. Soft, light, harmless thoughts. Snoke gave up and gestured angrily at the Knights.

“See to that noise. I don’t want to be disturbed until we’re finished here.” So he hadn’t detected Kylo, I thought guardedly to myself.

Half an hour later one of the Knights ran in, bowing low to Snoke as he came.

“I gave orders not to be disturbed until we had finished our observances!” said Snoke in a dangerous tone.

“We weren’t going to, but Supreme Leader, when we realised who we’d caught….” the Knight’s voice sank to a gargling whisper and I couldn’t make out the rest, but he was quivering with triumph. Snoke looked perturbed, and they had a muttered consultation. “Bring her to me!” he ordered the Knight at last, before looking over at me.

“Apparently somebody is trying to rescue you.”

I stared at him, refusing to ask who. He’d tell me anyway. He loved the sound of his own voice.

“General Organa! I doubt she’s alone, though. We’ll catch the rest soon enough. It’s not a big place.”

“Or they’ll find you,” I said coldly. There was something else inside Snoke’s planet now, beside the mad sucking drain of the Force in its crystal chamber. Something hot and alive.

_Rey, I’m here!_

Oh my stars! So long we had been closed off from each other. How long we’d hunted and hidden from each other, with literally all the Galaxy between us. And now he was here, really here!

_I know, I know!_ I called silently in my mind. I glanced over at Snoke, who had a look of deep concentration on his face. _Snoke knows too, he’s sent the Knights to look for you. We’re in the throne room…I’m pretending I’m asleep still. I won’t move until I see you. The drugs are wearing off. If somebody cuts me loose, I think I can fight…Thank the stars you came!_

_Of course I came. I love you!_

I thought my heart would burst for joy.

Snoke’s head snapped around to look at me. Well, of course he’d be aware now, he was always waiting to catch us in the Force-link.

“You!” he snarled, standing up to tower over me. “You called him here somehow, didn’t you? You _lured_ him here. I will kill him before he gets anywhere near you! You’ll watch him throw his life away for nothing.”

He lowered his head so we were face to face. “And then there’ll be only one way to bring him back,” he whispered, and his eyes slid towards the crystal room with a crafty look. He thought he’d found a way to make me give in. “You’ll plead for his life, and I’ll say, ‘Of course! I’m a merciful god, if only you’ll worship me.’”

I said nothing, but let my head loll as though I had no hope and was too weak to hold myself up. I didn’t want him remembering I was overdue for my drugs. In the distance I could hear a growing commotion: pounding footsteps, shouts, and the most exciting sound in the world: the clash and buzz of lightsabers. My hair stood up on my arms and my hands remembered what power felt like.

 

 

 

 

 


	38. Pawn to Queen Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which one of Snoke's most insignificant enemies comes into play.
> 
> * * *

The _Millennium Falcon_ was eerily quiet once everyone else had left. Spikey dropped into the gun well, where she could spin around for a complete view of the surface outside. She saw Kylo, Luke and Leia reach the nearest of the shabby hangars where the Knights of Ren parked their transport. They disappeared inside. Nothing more happened there.

Finn and Poe were still visible, cautiously checking each structure on the landing field. They took turns lifting heavy explosive charges out of each other’s backpacks and setting them against the walls of the hangars or the feet of the parked starships. They set the timers. She’d forgotten to ask how long they all had before the explosives went off.

After a while she saw them head past the perimeter of the landing field, close to the nearby horizon. The artificial gravity tilted them out of plumb to the planet’s surface, and they looked odd. Something by their feet caught their attention, and after discussing it for a while, they disappeared into what must have been some kind of sunken entrance.

For days the ship had felt busy, with Luke and Kylo practicing close-quarters combat in the cargo bay while Leia hovered in the cockpit where she could talk to the Resistance on the hypercomm. Poe and Finn had taken over the engineering station, spreading out disassembled weapons they were working on. Spikey had mooched around in the lounge, practicing her chitarra. Now she walked between the crew lounge and the cockpit a few times, stretching her arms and trying to enjoy the space, after so many days spent constantly apologising for being in everyone’s way.

She wound up in the galley. Everyone on this mission was likely to end up either dead or hungry, she thought. She could only fix one of those problems. She opened up the lockers above the galley and got down what she needed to make Corellian quickbread.

Maybe nobody would come back, and her sandwiches would get sad and droopy, and she’d have to eat them all herself. And then wait for the Knights of Ren to find her, since she couldn’t fly the _Falcon_ or any other ship. Or the timers would go off on the explosive charges at some point, blowing up the whole planetoid and her with it.

No point thinking like that. While the bread was puffing up, she concentrated on whipping together a spread. She tasted it. Too bland. The firecracker spice was in the top locker, out of reach. The ship was designed for taller people. Nice for Chewie, she thought. She climbed on the bench and pulled herself halfway into the locker, feeling among the boxes of supplies.

Just then she heard a sound. Not the cheerful sound of Poe or Finn slapping open the hatch with the confidence of a job well done. This was the sound of somebody who didn’t have an access code, burning their way through the lock. Or so she assumed, from the sizzling noise.

There was a shriek of air expelling itself through a hole somewhere and then a hum as the atmospheric field came on, stopping the ship from depressurising. The hatch opened with an unwilling groan. Somebody was using force on it. Or even, using the Force on it. A moment later she heard heavy footsteps on the other side of the wall. Someone was in the crew lounge.

Spikey had already boosted herself all the way into the storage locker. Now she hooked her fingernails around the edge of the door and tried to claw it shut from the inside. It scraped loudly on its tracks. Boxes shifted and rattled around her, and she heard the footsteps take on a more purposeful sound. As they approached, she could hear the unmistakeable hum of a lightsaber. A tiny sliver of the galley was visible through the imperfectly-shut cupboard door. Enough to see how glaringly obvious the plate of sandwiches was. Right below her hiding place.

“I know you’re in that cupboard. Come out!” rumbled a weirdly distorted voice.

Spikey shoved herself to the back of the cupboard. How far did it go? she wondered desperately. It was ironic that she was on a smuggler’s ship that was probably full of hidden compartments, and she didn’t know where any of them were. The thought filled her with anger at life’s stupid jokes.

“Come out!” said the Knight of Ren in a kind of bass roar.

“What’s in it for me?” said Spikey, who’d made a pact with herself long ago that she wouldn’t die crying, no matter how much of a coward she was. Her sharp tongue was the only weapon she had.

Suddenly the cupboard door and half the shelf she was lying on disintegrated in fiery streaks. Boxes and packets tumbled to the ground, and she found herself staring at an inhuman black helmet. The red glow of his lightsaber reflected off the expressionless lenses staring up at her, far too close.

She had a box in her hand: the one she’d been looking for. She tipped it into what she hoped was the helmet’s breathing vent.

The effect was spectacular. The Knight of Ren, face trapped in a helmet full of firecracker spice (“Eye-popping Hot!!!”) was thrashing around trying to get the thing off before his eyes exploded. He didn’t even know what he was doing with his lightsaber, and it was a lucky thing he’d spun around and was facing away from the galley. There wasn’t much left of Spikey’s perch. She began to fall, and turned it into a wild jump that landed her on the Knight’s head. She wrapped her arms around his neck and yanked it back with all her weight of her fall. She’d heard that a move like that could break somebody’s neck, and apparently this was true. There was a nauseating snap.

The Knight crumpled to the ground, dropping the lightsaber so it bored a hole in the floor. Spikey, who’d fallen in a sprawl next to it, edged further away. But the floor was smoking, so she cringingly picked up the lightsaber and found the “off” button.

She stood up, wondering how much Force this Knight had had, if he couldn’t predict her attack better than that. On the other hand, she hadn’t known what she was going to do until she’d done it, so maybe that was it.

She bent down and gingerly stripped off a gauntlet to check his pulse, in case the man — or whatever it was — had an unusually flexible neck and was not, in fact, dead.

“Nope, dead as a rock,” she muttered. Now what? She could assume there’d be more of them, and they’d come looking if this one didn’t return. She didn’t know whether the General’s attack had completely failed, but evidently Snoke’s people were aware of the _Millennium Falcon,_ and she couldn’t stay there. And surely Poe and Finn should have been back by now, unless something had gone terribly wrong?

There didn’t appear to be any more pressure suits on board. But the Knight had made it onto the ship somehow: she looked at his armour more closely and spotted a small shoulder-slung airpack and a hose that must clip into the breathing vents. Spikey paused, trying to see if she had any better options. Like hiding in a cupboard and hoping nobody found her. Then what? Starve to death?

Reluctantly, she started stripping off the Knight’s armour and putting it on herself, hoping the creature’s ragged cloak would hide how baggy and oversized the costume looked on her. This disguise would only work from a distance.

She paused when she took off its helmet. It was human — hardly surprising, given Snoke’s apparent loathing of other species — and not otherwise a monster. Merely a young man with a sour face and a slight haze of stubble. Not somebody she would have taken special care to avoid, if she’d met him in other circumstances. His nose was still running pathetically from the effects of the firespice. She wiped out the helmet carefully and put it on, tabbing the seals shut.

“That stuff even works after you’re dead,” she said to herself, and started in surprise at the bass growl her voice had become. The helmet had a voice-changer! Delighted, she stamped around roaring things like “You will release the prisoners instantly!” until she felt she’d really got the hang of it.

She clipped on the lightsaber, covered herself up with the Knight’s tatty cloak, and made her way to the _Falcon’s_ exit ramp, where she could see the barren surface of Snoke’s Misery. Just on the other side of the ship’s atmospheric field was a horrible vacuum probably full of deadly radiation. Even knowing the Knight’s armour had protected him on his way out to the _Falcon,_ it took all of Spikey’s courage to step down the ramp and onto the surface.

There was nowhere to go except Snoke’s base. In the light dust that covered the surface, she could see her Resistance friends’ footprints leading into one of the hangars and out to the perimeter. That didn’t seem to have worked too well for them. Pointing towards the _Falcon_ were the footprints of the Knight of Ren, and she followed them back to a different hangar that had an airlock. Getting in proved easy. The Knight’s costume included a wristband, and all she had to do was hold it up to the plate by the door, and it opened.

On the other side of the airlock was a long, dully-lit corridor, blessedly full of breathable air. In the poor light, Spikey could vaguely see round openings at random intervals going up, down and sideways. The environment didn’t entirely look man-made, or if it was, the designer was an idiot. She puffed out her chest, stuck her elbows out at a masculine angle and stomped down the corridor, in case she met anyone before she found somewhere to hide.

Almost immediately another Knight of Ren appeared through one of the larger side openings.

“You searched the whole ship already?” he rumbled at her through his mask. Spikey nodded and risked grunting out a “Yes” that apparently sounded convincing enough.

“Well, I doubt she was the only one in there, so we’ll keep searching the base for others!” growled the Knight. “Come on.”

Spikey guessed only Leia had been caught, then. Maybe all was not lost, then, she hoped. The Knight turned and Spikey followed him further into the base. She glanced in at the door from which he’d come out, as they passed. There seemed to be some sort of control room, with screens. It was empty now.

They followed a meandering course through the corridors. Soon they heard pounding footsteps coming towards them. A tall, thin Knight in elaborate armour barrelled around the next corner, cloak flying. His costume was decorated with the black-painted bones of some impressive beast.

“The Supreme Leader’s finished his meditations. He wishes to see the prisoner right away!” he shouted at them. Then he lowered his voice to a conspiratorial burr, tilting his tall body almost into them as he halted. “Did you hear who it was that we caught?” His black lenses glittered and he hissed excitedly, “Leia Organa! The General!”

The Knight in front of her gave a strangled-sounding whistle. Skeleton Knight leaned past him and looked at Spikey, who was trying to avoid notice.

“Ha Shorty! Why are you wearing B’nith’s helmet?”

“Why don’t you ask him?” said Spikey belligerently, hoping Skeleton Knight could come up with his own answers. The vocal processor made her voice sound like some ferocious swamp thing. Amazing!

“I thought B’nith was checking the enemy ship!” said the Skeleton Knight.

“Well, he was _meant_ to!” spat Spikey, making her voice sound feral. “But instead he decided _I_ should go, even though _my_ helmet isn’t airtight.…Look, it was a stupid argument, and we haven’t time for this. Let’s get the prisoner.”

“You go back to the scanner room,” said Skeleton Knight, shoving at the first Knight Spikey’d run into. “Shorty, you come with me!” Skeleton Knight turned on his heel and Spikey followed him, hoping he wouldn’t ask any more questions. But he did.

“You two fighting again?”

“Yes. He set my cloak on fire too. Now’s not the time to go over the gory details though.”

“Ha ha, now I see why you’re tripping over that one!” snortled the Knight, laughing through his mask like a barrel of gravel rolling downstairs.

_I’m tripping over it because I’m six inches shorter than the owner,_ thought Spikey, and kept praying for Skeleton Knight to be either stupid or easily distracted by stories. She was glad the Knight was walking fast, because it forced her to run to keep up. She was shaking so hard she doubted she could stand without her terror showing.

“So why did he set your cloak on fire?”

“It wasn’t what I was expecting, that’s for sure,” said Spikey, playing for time. “One minute we’re having a civilised conversation, or at least I thought so, and the next minute he’s all _‘Gaaaaah!!!!’_ at me!”

The Skeleton Knight treated her to his peculiarly unpleasant laugh again. The vocal processors were really something, she thought.

They stopped by a red patch on one of the walls. A thin line outlined a door below it. Skeleton Knight chuckled nastily. “I hope we can watch Snoke questioning her. I’d love to see her grovel to him!”

“I don’t trust her,” snarled Spikey, drawing the dead Knight’s lightsaber with a flourish. Skeleton Knight nodded in agreement absently, watching the door carefully as he keyed it open with his wristband. Spikey fumbled with the “on” switch to the lightsaber. It seemed pretty sketchy compared to Kylo’s. The blade flickered and wavered, appearing ready to short out at any moment. She gripped the handle tightly.

The General was waiting on the other side of the door. She had a fresh bruise on one cheek, but she looked undaunted as she glared up at Skeleton Knight looming over her.

“Ugh, look at you! You must be Sir Try-hard,” she said, unimpressed. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit? Are you going to cut me up here and now, or do I get to enjoy some conversation with your weird leader?”

“Room service,” said Spikey, from behind the Knight.

“Yah, huh huh huh, room service!” said the Knight, stepping into the room.

“And pest extermination,” said Spikey, putting the lightsaber into his back. It went in like a red hot poker through butter. The Knight of Ren gave a shudder and collapsed. The General looked at Spikey with dawning suspicion.

“It’s Spikey isn’t it?”

Spikey took her helmet off. “Yep. Luckily for me one of the Knights of Ren is called Shorty, and I’m being him.” She toed the black crumpled heap on the floor. “That’s the second one I’ve killed. I thought I’d feel more guilty, but I think I’m too scared.” Fear was running through her as though she was earthing some tremendous voltage. Her whole body vibrated with it.

The General nodded. “That happens. Where are the others?”

“I don’t know. Poe and Finn didn’t come back from laying the charges. Last I saw, they were climbing down a hole. I haven’t seen Luke or Ky — Ben since you all went in together.”

“We got split up when the other two were sucked down a hole with some kind of tractor beam. The whole place is a mynock’s maze of tunnels. If the others haven’t been caught, then they could simply be lost.”

“The Knights said they were looking for more people because they didn’t think you could be the only one in the _Falcon_. That’s how I got found — one of them went to search the ship.” Spikey explained how she’d ambushed the first Knight with a box of firespice. “They don’t seem very bright,” she said.

“Ben said Rey thought so too. Maybe too much Force has scrambled their brains or something. You’re lucky you can’t feel the Force right now. It’s giving me a headache,” the General said. “Now, let’s find Snoke. I can’t wear that Knight’s costume — he’s far too tall. Put your helmet back on and we’ll pretend you’re escorting me to Snoke under guard.”

The General quickly stripped the fallen Knight of all his weapons, hiding them around her jumpsuit. Spikey was impressed by how quickly and calmly she took control of the situation. The General must have been frantic with worry about her son and her brother, but Spikey couldn’t hear so much as a tremor to her voice. In fact, she seemed almost happy. It was infectious. The General made it seem like they were on some schoolgirl escapade, out for a lark.

A minute later they were walking down the corridors again, Spikey’s hand firmly twisted into the General’s hair and the lightsaber hovering threateningly near her shoulders.

“Is this how it’s done, General?” she whispered.

“Usually, yes,” said the General. “And call me Leia, for stars’ sake!”

There were other doors in the corridor, marked by the same red patches overhead. Spikey keyed all of them with her wristband, but they were empty except for the last one, which seemed to be some kind of storage room. The first thing they saw was the scarred and silent dome of R2D2. He appeared to have been switched off and shoved into a corner.

Leia gave a little gasp and ran to him and felt his metal form all over as though her human hands could bring life into him. She frowned and leaned her forehead against him, concentrating. “Come on R2!” she muttered.

“Doesn't he have an ‘on’ switch?”

“It never worked before. He plays dead when he wants to. He can keep it up for years. Come on R2, it’s me!”

R2D2 suddenly lit up and uttered a low chatter. Leia hugged him, obviously moved by his revival. But just as suddenly, she was all business again.

“R2, can you hack into a dataport? Try to download a map of this place. See if we can find where Snoke and Rey would be, and the others!”

They looked around the storeroom for a dataport, but there was nothing like that. There were spindly metal shelves with a display of clothes and weapons. Lost property, thought Spikey. Or maybe trophies.

“Huh, here’s my blaster too!” said Leia, pleased. She tucked the little needle-point into her sleeve. They were about to leave when Leia spotted the white gleam of a Resistance flight suit. She lunged in and grabbed it, holding it up. It was filthy.

“This is Rey’s, I’m sure of it!” she crowed. Something else rolled out from behind where it had lain. A lightsaber. Spikey pounced on it and then caught sight of the General’s face. She was staring at the lightsaber with peculiar intensity.

“What’s this doing here?” said Spikey.

“That was….hers. And Luke’s. And…my father’s.”

“And now it’s yours, I guess,” said Spikey, handing it to her.

Leia turned it over and over, her expression unreadable. She seemed to weigh it in her hands.

“Is it heavy?” asked Spikey.

“It’s full of death,” said Leia. “And then it was lost for a long time. It was against all the odds that it should come back to us. A big mystery. Why should it come back from the depths where it was thrown? And yet, here it is again. I wonder why the Knights aren’t using it?” Lips curled, Leia tested the fit of it in her palm. For the first time Spikey could see the whites right around her eyes. It was unsettling.

That object, with all the stories around it, made Spikey feel like they were all doomed in some way. Spikey had always thought she was meant to tell stories, not to be part of them. Seeing Leia so shaken brought her own fears pouring back into her. She wished this was all over.

“Let’s move before I faint,” she said.

Cautiously they ventured into the corridor again and went along trying different doors. Again, the corridor kept branching in random and confusing ways. Leia kept a close eye on the floor, looking for the marks and scratches that showed frequent use.

“Here,” she said, and they tried a door. It was a very basic, industrial-looking kitchen. A couple of server droids started up at the sight of them. R2D2 settled them down with some binary talk.

“My kind of place,” said Spikey. “Look, there’s a tray laid out ready. Maybe this is where Rey’s meals are made.

Leia picked up a pair of hypos laid out on the tray. “Look at this. Rey told Kylo they were drugging her to keep her Force powers dampened down.” Leia looked around the kitchen, chewing her lip. “This might be where they keep the drugs too.”

Both of them started for the cooler at the same time, pulling open the doors and rifling through the shelves. The drugs were obvious, stored in ranked rows, shelf after shelf, needle points gleaming. Leia seized a whole lot of them and stuffed them into her utility belt so she could grab them in a cluster if she needed to.

Meanwhile R2D2 seemed to be interrogating the server droids to find out where the food was sent. He finished the conversation with a little whistle of triumph that seemed to call Leia’s attention. She gave him a feral grin and a thumbs-up before whipping out her blaster and drilling both server droids through their central processors. Or so Spikey assumed, because they went dark immediately. It seemed callous, but what choice did they have? R2D2 didn’t seem worried by it.

“Dead droids tell no tales,” said Leia briskly. “Come on, what did you find out, R2?”

R2 tweedled urgently and led the way out. Before they reached the door, they heard a great clatter approaching along the corridor outside. They froze. The sound mounted to a crescendo, and they caught a glimpse of a mass of battle droids scuttling past. There were shouts, and a handful of the Knights of Ren followed the droids at a run, urging them on.

Leia and Spikey waited until the noise had died away.

“I’m guessing they’ve found the others,” whispered Leia after a moment. Spikey saw her thinking, calculating their options. “We should still try to get to Snoke. R2 got a basic map of this facility off those droids, and he says there’s a kind of throne room. The others will have to look after themselves.”

Kylo and Luke alone against how many? thought Spikey.

“R2, probably best if you keep looking for a dataport. See how much chaos you can create. We’ll carry on to the throne room. Give us a look at the map.”

R2 projected the hologram of Snoke’s base he’d taken from the server droids. There wasn’t much detail — a faint mass of coiling worm-tunnels was merely hinted at — but the main corridors were marked in and the route seemed simple enough.

“Okay, I’ve got it,” said Leia. “R2, if you find the others, you can show them the way too. Now go, you know what to do.”

Leia looked over at Spikey, lowering her head. Spikey shut her helmet, took a handful of Leia’s hair, switched on her lightsaber and pretended to push Leia out the door. Nobody was around except a security drone, cruising the corridor.

“You’ve wasted enough of my time, prisoner!” growled Spikey through the voice processor, and gave Leia an extra shove.

The drone paused to watch them for a moment then buzzed off like a fat fly, apparently convinced everything was in order. Leia and Spikey made their way towards the throne room, with Leia hissing directions. They could hear distant shouts and the “pew pew” of blasters, but they were not headed that way. Ahead of them they could see the corridor widen to accommodate a pair of tall doors, engraved with golden starbursts and shut tight. They would have to throw them open, stride in, and deal with whatever they found on the other side.

Spikey began to breathe in deep gasps like someone preparing for a dive, pumping oxygen in and out. Trying to push the fear out of her lungs. Beside her she could see Leia doing the same, only Leia had a completely different look in her eyes. Her fingers were running a quick check of her hidden weapons.

“Ready?” said Leia.

“Show time,” said Spikey through clenched teeth. She wound one hand in Leia’s hair, raised her lightsaber, and they both ran towards the doors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	39. Battle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fate of the Force and the Galaxy will be decided in Snoke's dark throneroom.
> 
> * * *

  
At last I know the only way us mortals can turn back time is through our gift of memory.

When Kylo and Finn ran into that evil room I remembered them that day on Starkiller Base, and the memory was as alive to me as the present. Finn had shown me courage and loyalty I have never forgotten since. Kylo had shown me a power I did not recognise even as I claimed it for my own.

Kylo came in on a surge of that same amazing power. His eyes swept the room and he saw Snoke, the throne, the pathetic flowers and the incense on the altar, and me, the holy icon of Snoke’s religion. And it was to me he turned, with the same awe on his face that I had seen that day and rejected.

I was ready for that worship now, for the passion in his eyes and the avenging lightning in his hands. Barely a flick of a glance for Snoke, who crouched now, tensed for combat. Kylo ran straight to me, lightsaber drawn, not to kill me but to free me. My bonds fell away in a shiver of light and I never felt even a spark of heat from the strike.

“Not a single word for me, your old master?” said Snoke, the towering narcissist that he was. His hands were raised, full of coiled pain.

Unflinching, Kylo ignored Snoke and caught me as I fell from my niche on the wall.

My long fall was over. He’d been waiting to catch me all these years. Awake or dreaming, he’d remembered that time when he’d seen me as a child, trapped on top of a wall, refusing his help.

I couldn’t remember, but he had remembered for me. All these years.

He told me I’d said, _One of you won’t catch me. The dark one._

But now he caught me, the other one caught me. Always, he’d told me, the dreams where he caught me were the good dreams.

His arms were strong, he had a solid weight in the world, and the heat blazing off him was something I didn’t know I needed until I felt it.

But no time for that now, because Poe had come charging in on Finn’s heels and Snoke was ready to strike. Time slowed. I could take in the rasping hum and shriek of lightsabers in the corridor outside: surely Luke, fighting some kind of rearguard action falling back towards our position in the throne room. Finn and Poe seemed to move in slow motion as they skidded to a stop. I saw Snoke fixating on them, seeing potential victims, easy meat, hostages. My Force powers were coming back and I could see everything and everyone, both the surfaces and the intentions.

Finn and Poe looked around trying to take it all in. Finn caught sight of me just before Kylo reached me. He gave a kind of nod, like his business with us was finished, and spun to plant himself in front of his enemy, Snoke. In this war of Force-users he was hopelessly outmatched, but he didn’t hesitate for a second. He raised a blaster. Poe was right behind him.

I remembered what I’d seen and felt as I lay in the snow that day on Starkiller Base: Finn confronting an enemy so vastly more powerful than him. Like that day had come again I saw him, courage blazing.

Snoke flung out one arm in a wide gesture and Finn and Poe were scooped up and thrown against the walls with such force that I feared they were dead. They flopped limply onto the floor. Snoke tossed their blasters into the crystal room with a flick of his hand, and they vanished in a puff of smoke. He laughed.

It enraged me that he chose to hurt Finn and Poe before confronting the only people who posed any real threat to him. “I’ll kill you twice for that!” I yelled, struggling out of Kylo’s arms. I could stand on my own, but not more than that. The Force was coming to me but too slow, _too slow._ My anger would open a door to it, though, and soon the trickle of power would become a flood. Dark or Light, I didn’t care.

Kylo stepped front of me as a shield.

Luke ran into the room just then. Snoke stood up. He had no weapon, and so he used the Force-push again, brutally. Luke staggered but kept his feet. An invisible wind seemed to blow against him, but he kept on coming, shoving himself step by step towards Snoke.

“Go, help him!” I said to Kylo, putting my hand on the small of his back. A little push. He reached behind him and squeezed my hand before beginning to stalk Snoke, circling for his off side while he was busy with Luke.

Kylo’s strike from behind Snoke was as fast as a serpent, but something was wrong. Snoke wasn’t even bothering to fight. Some power streaming out of him bent Kylo’s lightsaber back at an angle. The blade spat and snarled and skidded off an invisible shield Snoke had made for himself. Snoke made a dismissive gesture behind his back, and I saw Kylo stagger.

Luke was having the same problem. Snoke was smiling cruelly now, and we saw Luke’s green lightsaber bend and slide away from Snoke’s Force-shield. I remembered the old history I’d read, where Snoke in some former incarnation had held off a whole band of Nightsisters. He’d found something better than swordplay, and he was almost laughing now. Kylo and Luke were exhausting themselves, striking and striking against Snoke’s shield. Around and around. Knocking over the things on the altar, upending the altar itself. Snoke didn’t even look tired.

A small movement to one side caught my attention. Finn opened his eyes. I could tell he was in terrible pain. I sidled over to him and took his hand and he gave me a weak twitch of the lips. Trying to smile. In that moment I was so angry, so incandescent with anger at the injustice of it. Finn should never have got mixed up in this contest of Force-users, and Snoke’s treatment of him was just a sample of how he’d make the small people suffer in a war that was none of their deserving.

The battle in the centre of the throne room changed abruptly. I felt it, and shouted a warning. Two of the Knights of Ren limped into the throne room and started hacking at Luke with their lightsabers. Luke turned to despatch them, and in the moment of distraction Snoke reversed his Force-push to a Force-pull. It was a risky move, and he had to dance away from a slashing stroke by Kylo. But with his inhumanly long legs, Snoke could move frighteningly fast. An instant later, Luke’s lightsaber was flying towards Snoke’s hand.

I didn’t even think. I flung out my hand and called it, just as I’d called Luke’s last lightsaber to me. The Force felt slow in me, unwilling. But it obeyed me enough that the lightsaber glanced off Snoke’s outstretched fingers and flew instead into the crystal room. There it lay, its point sunk into the floor, sparks of light flickering around it. The sound of its blade rose higher and higher, to the edge of hearing.

I had to get it.

Snoke met my eyes then. He’d reignited his shield, hurling Kylo back with it so hard that I heard a snapping noise when his elbow connected with the wall. Kylo roared with rage and pushed himself off the wall to charge at Snoke, but Snoke ignored him. Luke was dancing unarmed around the two Knights, and Snoke ignored them too. His eyes kept flicking between the lightsaber burning a hole in the floor, and me.

“If you go in there without me, the Force will suck your mind out of you and turn you into a monster,” he said. “You’ll be all power and no judgement. I see the anger and the hate in you. What will the Force become, fed by that?”

It was true. I was surely no Jedi. The will to murder coursed through my veins, and something inside the crystal room yammered to me. _Come come come!_ Maybe the lightsaber itself speaking to me.

Kylo was on the other side of the room from me, keeping up his attack on Snoke. But Snoke had the palm of his hand raised to him, and Kylo was struggling like an insect in syrup. He could barely raise his lightsaber against the weight of Force clogging his every movement. Blood streamed from his nose.

“Rey,” said Snoke, his eyes fixed on mine. “There is the light, and there is the cleansing fire, and there is that which will burn down the Galaxy. Which will you be?”

My fury seemed to delight him. I could see, dimly, how he wanted to drive me beyond all power of reason. He was mad to the core. Even after all his carefully-laid plans, he’d let the Galaxy burn, just to see what happened.

I took deep breaths to try to calm myself, but each breath only seemed to power me up more. The Force, or my feelings: I couldn’t tell them apart.

The lightsaber in the crystal room was boring a hole in the floor, making a muffled screaming noise. Snoke was trying to conceal how much that worried him, but his attention kept straying in that direction. I should focus on that. _THINK!_ I told myself. What is he hiding?

Near the other door, the dance of a Jedi master and the Knights came to an ugly end. Luke had taken too many strikes and so had his opponents. He’d disabled both their lightsabers, but one of the Knights was strangling him and Luke was strangling him back. The second knight kicked Luke in the head. Luke fell back, managing a brutal hammering kick towards the other man’s throat as he did so. Both of them collapsed, the Knight vomiting blood. The victor got up on all fours and looked over at Snoke.

“I suppose you want my praise, for being the last surviving Knight of Ren,” Snoke told him. “But it’s time you realised you’re just a tool, and an ugly one at that,” he said. He used the Force to crash the Knight head-first against the doorframe. His helmet split and his neck was obviously broken.

Snoke looked between Kylo and me, licking his lips and enjoying our disgust at his casual cruelty. “They were always craving my approval. Like you, Kylo.”

Amazingly, Kylo didn’t explode, and I knew in that moment how much he’d changed. He simply let Snoke’s jibe slide off him with a snort of contempt. If Kylo could control himself, so could I, I thought. I even felt a flash of sympathy for all the dead Knights of Ren, victims of Snoke’s endless mind games.

All this time I’d been holding Finn’s hand and resting my other hand on Poe’s shoulder. Finn was barely conscious; Poe I wasn’t sure about. I wanted to shield them from all this, but Luke’s injuries pulled on my attention too. Snoke stood over Luke, toeing him with one filthy foot and watching our reactions.

Just then R2D2 and BB8 glided silently into view just outside the door. I thought Snoke couldn’t see them from where he was. He certainly couldn’t sense them, not being one to believe that droids can be people.

BB8 twittered very softly. Poe must have been conscious after all, for he groaned softly.

“What?” whispered Finn. I moved slightly to block Snoke’s view of him.

“The charges. Timers aren’t working. Needs the detonator,” muttered Poe, very quietly.

Detonators? I realised they must have a back-up plan. They probably had orders to blow the whole place up if the Force-users couldn’t take down Snoke. No matter who was still alive in here.

“I don’t know where we dropped it,” said Finn.

“I could find it,” said Poe. “But how can I get there?” I looked at his legs, bent where there weren’t usually joints, and the problem was obvious. Behind us, BB8 and R2D2 were holding a hurried consultation.

Snoke heard us and broke off his monologue. “You’re fond of those poor men aren’t you?” he asked, looking over at us. “Maybe it would be kinder to put them out of their pain.”

“Rey will never do what you want if you hurt them,” said Kylo, still glued to the wall behind Snoke. Snoke turned to him, and the droids came to a decision. BB8 shot his cable launchers towards Poe. Poe snapped them around his wrists. R2D2 fastened his clamps on BB8, suctioned himself to the floor, and braced them both while BB8 reeled Poe out of the room. They made off down the corridor like greased lightning, Poe bumping and dragging behind them. The door slammed shut after them.

“Good riddance,” said Snoke, trying to act as though Poe’s escape didn’t concern him. Though I could tell it did: it proved he couldn’t control everyone at once. “And now, the other one.”

“He’s dead already,” I lied, finding enough power to erase Finn’s presence in the Force. Snoke shrugged.

“Pity. But that’s the way with grunts like them. The important thing is, I have the pair of you. A set. Good. I like collecting things.” But under Snoke’s arrogance I could sense a fear. His eyes still kept flicking towards the crystal room, where Luke’s lightsaber was now spinning slowly under its own power.

He walked slowly towards Kylo, who was first pushed against the wall and then flattened across it. His ribs heaved and spasmed as he tried to breathe.

“I only really need the one of you,” Snoke whispered, looking over at me.

“Don’t touch him!” I cried.

Kylo looked at me urgently. “He doesn’t want you to go _in there.”_ He jerked his chin at the crystal room. “He’s tiring.”

The Force was coming back to me as the drugs dissolved out of my system at last. Kylo could sense it. He locked his eyes on mine, pleading. This close to each other, we could read each other’s thoughts and finally there was nothing Snoke could do to block us.

_I love you. Do what you need to do,_ he said. _Even if we all die, we have to destroy HIM! Either get in that room if you can, or try to hold Snoke off long enough for me to go._

_I need you!_ I screamed silently. If I went in the crystal room like I was, with my blood on fire for vengeance and my mind darkened by so much hate, I would come out as an angel of destruction, one of the furies. I wouldn’t know Kylo. And I’d never even had a chance to live yet.

_You’re right. If anyone should go in, it should be me. I had my chance to live,_ said Kylo. _I had power, I had a lover, I travelled the galaxy. At least I got to meet you first. That was something worth while._

_That’s rubbish!_ I said. _None of it came to anything. You can’t sacrifice yourself for me. And what’s the point of discussing it, anyway? Snoke has us pinned down._

I hadn’t tried moving against Snoke’s suffocating Force, but I had no doubt he’d turn it on me if I attempted anything. I still needed more time, time for my power to come all the way back.

We were interrupted by the arrival of Leia, struggling in the grip of one of the Knights of Ren. Snoke’s head whipped around and he stared at them, hardly believing what he was seeing. Surely he could read Leia’s intentions? And Spikey, in her borrowed Knight’s costume, didn’t fool me for a moment. I knew her. I could feel her, a supernova of fear, giving the performance of her life. But Snoke was only looking for what he wanted to see, and that was always his weakness. He saw a desperate, furious mother, and his mind leapt greedily to imagining the pleasure he’d get by tormenting her in front of us.

He didn’t notice Spikey’s terror under her mask, staking everything on a mad gamble. She stormed into the room, shoving Leia in front of her, and roared through the mask’s vocal processor.

“This is your new overlord! You will _grovel_ to him. If he orders you to clean the floor, you will clean it with your _tongue._ Down, Leia Organa, and lick his feet!”

Snoke couldn’t resist this show. “Leia Organa,” he purred, advancing on her. He was still keeping Kylo immobilised with one hand, but Kylo and I exchanged a boggle-eyed look behind his back.

Snoke didn’t see how Leia’s mind was racing under the surface. Even as she staggered towards Snoke, arms crossed defensively in front of her, she sized up the situation. She saw how Kylo’s lightsaber was bent away from Snoke’s invisible shield, and how Kylo himself was flattened by it. As Spikey pushed her towards Snoke, Leia saw the lightsaber in Spikey’s hand bend and split into a sheaf of snaking lines that formed a curved surface around Snoke before breaking. Useless. Spikey seemed paralysed by the sight.

I knew what Leia hid under her right hand, and saw the thought form in her mind: _Lightsabers are useless here._ A fast thinker.

Snoke was still keeping Kylo pressed to the wall with one hand, but with the other he made an ironic welcoming gesture to Leia. Allowing Spikey to throw Leia down on the floor right in front of him.

Whatever Leia had in her other hand, she jabbed into Snoke’s sandalled feet. Suddenly five hypos were sprouting from them, and I laughed, knowing exactly how it felt to have those drugs go into him. Snoke danced away with a roar, whirling around, both hands spread out. Leia and Spikey both flew into the air and hit the ceiling before falling to the ground. He advanced on them both, his face twisted with rage. One foot slightly dragging.

“Your son will watch me tear you to pieces with my bare hands before he dies!” he screamed. Leia rolled onto her back, pulling out a blaster. Snoke fended off her shots but lost his hold on Kylo, who waded through Snoke’s defences and came at him, lightsaber raised. Snoke used the Force to yank the blaster out of Leia’s grip. Kylo sliced it in two before it could fly into Snoke’s hands.

Snoke dived and rolled clumsily away from Kylo’s next attack, snatching up the other lightsaber from Spikey’s lax hand where she lay unmoving on the floor. He staggered up, his movements already becoming uncoordinated. He could never win a duel with Kylo now, but that was not what he intended to do. Leia was coming at him with a long knife, and she could not avoid the windmilling sweep of Snoke’s long arms. A moment later he was holding her, arms twisted behind her back, and standing over Spikey.

“I’ll cut them both in half if you take one step towards me,” he snarled at Kylo.

How long would the drugs take to disable Snoke? I wondered. Too long. Snoke was going to hurt them, hurt all of us. Meanwhile my strength was coming into me, into my muscles. Would it be enough? It would have to be.

I had been crouching by Finn all this time. He seemed to know what was going on. He gave my hand a squeeze. _He_ wouldn’t have hesitated, I thought. He’d barely had a chance to taste freedom when he laid his life on the line for me. How could I do less for him?

_Goodbye,_ I said in my mind, to Kylo. My heart breaking for him, because he’d fought so bravely for me, but I couldn’t stay for him.

Quick as a Jakku sand-lizard, I flung myself across the polished floor towards the doorway of the crystal room. The power inside beat on my face.

Snoke’s Force-push rolled across me, trying to squash me to the floor, but I wriggled under it. His power was waning. Though in the end, it was not a question of speed, or power, but of belief that got me into that room: I believed myself one of the nameless darting creatures that survive by speed and stealth.

And I was in.

I picked up Luke’s green lightsaber. It felt like I’d completed a circuit. Power coursed through me. The Force lit me up like a torch, my nerves a tree of light. A minute of this and I would burn out.

Snoke shouted something incoherent from the throne room behind me. I think he might even have come after me, staking everything on a gamble that he could survive the Force’s transformation despite everything he’d told me. But he hesitated, and both Leia and Kylo seized their chance to break the impasse. I could feel the bright purity of Kylo’s battle-mind focused on Snoke, keeping him away from the others and barring him from the door to me.

As I pulled the lightsaber out of the hole it had made in the floor, the Force stopped its mad keening and I felt it first like an embrace, and then like the whole of the oceans of all the worlds rising to drag me down. It was aware. I felt its pain, and I felt its gratitude that I’d pulled out the lightsaber that was hurting it here, at its point of consciousness.

My mind was guttering, bewildered by the Force vibrating off the surfaces of this crystal room that now seemed to have no beginning or end. And in here with me, something unimaginably powerful struggling to be born through my consciousness. Neither good nor evil, it would kill me.

If there were time, I could have taught it to love the splendid and various tracery of life that called the Galaxy home. The living things I loved so well. But there was no time.

I raised the lightsaber and brought it down with all my strength on the sparkling walls around me. Through the pounding in my ears I could dimly hear Snoke’s roar of rage. Crystal burned and shattered with a scream as I marred the perfection of this shining artefact he had spent his life to build. Again and again I struck, sparks raining down around me, and for a terrible moment the Force almost found a voice to cry out. My voice. I wrestled with it, shaken by its monstrously powerful desires. It begged to eat me and live through me.

I struck and slashed, and the crystal walls fractured, cracks spalling in lightning patterns. Each mark I made in Snoke’s creation weakened the terrible pressure of Force focused only here, only now. I felt I was going mad, filled with a terrible black anger and hunger to survive. Mine or the Force’s, I couldn’t tell.

Then suddenly Kylo was there with me, his strength feeding into me, and his mind too. He was my clarity in all the confusion.

_I know you, Rey from Jakku. You are not this. You are here with me._

Then the bewildering light dimmed and I could see at last what was there, the cunningly aligned lenses, the mathematically perfect curves that focused everything to this point. A prison and a trap and a maze, for the Force and for me.

We raised our lightsabers together, the gold and the green, and put an end to whatever limitlessly powerful being was emerging here, the thing Snoke had tended with his insane midwifery. Together we were strong enough, and we did it. Whatever it was, for good or evil, we cut it free from the Galaxy we live in.

I had to think we set the Force free when we broke those walls. I cannot bear to think otherwise, for I revere life.

It passed away out of that room and I felt as though the Galaxy breathed again, all life and the stars themselves joined together in one long exhalation of relief.

We finished in the centre of the room, panting, leaning on each other. Snoke was in the doorway, still holding one of the red lightsabers. His face seemed to have melted, the features running into each other. The eyes were unchanged. So much hate was in them. He was obviously weakened, but we were utterly spent. We raised our lightsabers, but I don’t know how we could have fought him off, when our arms were shaking and we could barely stand. He started towards us across the ruined floor, kicking aside shards of crystal as he came.

“Stop right there,” said a voice behind him. It was Leia, back on her feet again. “Turn around and face me at last.”

Snoke paused in the doorway, looking between Leia and us. I wondered that anyone could have ever doubted whether Leia had the Force. It rolled off her in waves.

Snoke had never looked less like a god, dithering in the doorway. Leia advanced on him, eyes filled with steely purpose.

“I have fought you all my life, in one form or another,” Leia said, low and furious. “You’ve always used somebody else to fight for you. You took my son and tried to make him your tool. I’m so glad I get to face you at last.”

“I would have _made_ something of this Galaxy. Something so much greater…” said Snoke, his speech slurred.

“There are no excuses for what you did,” Leia said.

“You can’t imagine the glory of what I started here…” began Snoke.

“No last words. You’ve said enough, and for far too long.” She felt around in the sleeves of her pressure suit. For a moment she looked bizarrely like an old lady rummaging in her handbag for something, which she pulled out at last with a little cluck of satisfaction.

Luke’s other lightsaber.

Suddenly the small, slightly bent woman was gone. Now Leia looked like one of the Goddesses of Justice from a temple carving. The old one with the creaky voice, who whispers her judgement under the sleepless beds of the guilty.

Snoke raised his hands as though to stop her. “You don’t even know how to…” he began.

“Don’t I? Well, I guess we’re about to find out,” said Leia with a feral grin. At heart still the same sassy warrior princess she had always been. She ignited the lightsaber and the pure blue blade snapped out. Reflexively, Snoke held up his own blade and tried to lunge at her. His feet stumbled and he gave a half-skip to stay upright. Leia’s blade connected with his as he threw one hand out for balance. The inferior blade disintegrated and Snoke was left with only the hilt. Leia stepped back and regarded him silently, lightsaber held loosely in one hand.

Snoke seemed mesmerised. It was her force of will that was pinning _him_ in place, now.

With the slow gravity of an executioner, Leia raised the blade over her head. Its point hung trembling in the air for a moment before she brought it straight down on Snoke and cleaved him from crown to innards.

What was left of him dropped to the floor, an unsightly mess oozing out the last of its life.

Leia stood for a moment, sighed, switched off the lightsaber and dropped it.

It was over.

I wrapped my arms around Kylo and kissed him. The salt blood and sweat of him beading his lips, the breath and heat of him, the way his tight-strung muscles softened and relaxed into me, the way his arms enfolded me, all of it, all of him, bringing me back to humanity at last.

 

 

 


	40. Aftermath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey and Kylo, alone at last. Now they have more in common than they ever expected.
> 
>  
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> * * *

I woke a few days later to the familiar sound of the _Millennium Falcon's_ engines thrumming through my bunk. My head felt foggy and my body too heavy to move, as though I were recovering from illness. A warm heavy hand was resting on mine. I turned my head and met Kylo’s smile. He was sitting on the floor by the head of the bed, and I knew that he’d been there for hours, maybe days.

He didn’t have to ask how I felt. He knew, just as I knew how he felt. He was bone-tired but filled with more peace than I’d ever seen in him.

“What happened?” I asked.

“We’re on our way back to D’Qar,” he said simply. “Snoke’s dead, and that miserable ball of rock came to pieces once the Force stopped holding it in place. The black hole ripped it up. It’ll swallow it.”

“I guess we were lucky to get out, then,” I said, trying to remember what had happened. Leia was the only one left unhurt at the end of the battle with Snoke. “Did…is everyone else okay?”

“The droids helped get us all out,” Kylo said. “Poe sent them back to see who won, and they found some flatbed lift-haulers to get us all back to the airlock.”

I shuddered, thinking about it. I guessed that if Snoke had captured us, Poe would have blown us all up.

Kylo caught my thought. “He said it was the worst time of his life, lying there with two broken legs and a detonator, wondering if he was going to have to use it.”

I laced my fingers with his and squeezed his hand before drifting off to sleep again.

Over the next few days everyone came in to spend time with me. Luke, wrapped in so many bacta patches he looked like an animated mummy. He didn’t say much but I could tell he was proud of me. Leia, who laid her hand on my forehead and smiled at me. One warrior queen to another, her smile seemed to say. Spikey brought in cups of tea and bowls of soup, but likewise said little. I made her shy, I could tell. Finn and Poe sat beside me and made me laugh, although I had the sense Poe was trying to cheer Finn up as much as me.

Once when Finn was alone with me I tried to tell him how he’d given me the courage to fight what Snoke had made in that crystal room.

“I never saw you hesitate, Finn. You were willing to lay down your life.”

“Well, you’re that kind of person too,” he said. “That’s why I liked you right away when I met you. I mean, as soon as you stopped beating me up,” he said, but his smile faded quickly.

Everyone was being very gentle with me. Far more gentle than I was on myself. As the days went by and I got my strength back, I became filled with a sense that a terrible crime had been committed. Luke walked in once and saw me lying there, tears seeping from under my eyelids, and he seemed to understand.

The Force felt different than it had before, and not just to me. Looser, more passive.

“What have I done?” I asked, feeling like I might suddenly start sobbing.

“What you had to do. What we needed you to do.”

It was the wrong answer, and Luke knew it. I’d never wanted to be a piece in their game, their White Queen. Luke left in a hurry to get Kylo.

I thought bitterly about all the people that had tried to use me for their own ends, and I was still angry when Kylo came in. He wanted things from me too, after all.

“What is it, Rey?” he asked, wiping my tears with his sleeve. I couldn’t answer, but my anger left me and I just lay there, trying not snuffle disgustingly into the pillow. Kylo had had a lifetime of people trying to use him for _his_ powers. I was ashamed to have forgotten that.

He sat on the bed, his weight making it bend under him so I rolled against his warmth. He’d found a brush somewhere, perhaps Leia’s. Silently he started to brush the tangles out of my hair, spreading it in a fan across my pillow. He helped me sit up, and brushed out the back, curving his arm around my shoulders to do so. Somewhere he’d learned patience. He waited, letting me draw comfort from his strength, and trusting that I would speak in my own time. Yet he was trembling too. He had wanted to hold me for so long.

“We didn’t just kill Snoke,” I said at last. “I mean, we’re free at last, and it’s wonderful. But we killed something in that crystal room. Something that never existed before. It wanted to live. Now we’ll never know what it could have been.”

Kylo grew very still. Just one thumb smoothing a line down my back, so gently.

“The Force has always been alive. It’s still alive.”

“Not the way it wanted to be! Able to _see_ and hear and _think_ and, and, and, _experience_ the world! To speak, to be _heard!”_ I lost control of my voice and buried my face in Kylo’s shoulder before I started wailing.

“I know. It nearly made it.” He patted my back. “But look, giving it awareness was Snoke’s idea! He would have done something terrible with it. Even if it swallowed him alive, what would it have turned into? Even if he didn’t make himself a god, imagine what evil he might have done, being there and trying to control its….control its…”

“Its _birth!_ I feel like a _murderer!”_ I cried.

“It could have controlled the whole Galaxy. If it could have spoken, I’m very afraid of what it would have said to us.”

“I still feel so guilty.”

Kylo nudged my chin up so we could look at each other. I still didn’t know his face well. His lips were more full than I remembered, an odd contrast to the sharp angles of his cheek and jaw. I hadn’t quite remembered the unusual tilt to his eyes, the long narrow lids and thick lashes. Or if I had, I thought I’d made them up. I had just as many memories of another face, after all — one white with anger, teeth bared, snarling.

No sign of that now. There was a nakedness to his gaze, and I could see the thoughts that flickered under the surface, fast and subtle creatures of the deep. His eyes were beautiful, and he let me see his secrets there. I felt a kind of wonder, then, that he would trust me so.

I realised how guilt had eaten into his soul like an acid that etches into a mineral, making jagged edges and strange curves with a sorrowful beauty all of their own.

I would spend my life tracing over the rough surfaces and hollows it had left. I would give my heart to fill the empty places. In that moment I understood that I would stay with him. Who else would teach me how to carry the weight of my guilt?

I reached up and kissed him, deeply and slowly. Something I had never done before, with anyone. He pulled me close with a kind of gasp, leaning into my kiss. My heart started to beat with a life it hadn’t felt in months, deep, rib-shaking hammer blows. I could feel his heart too, knocking on my ribs, wanting in.

As we kissed I touched the scars I had made on him all those months ago, with and pity and regret. My lips on the silvery mark across his face, then, reaching under his shirt, my fingers on the seam across his collarbone.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“Don’t be sorry. I scared you. What were you supposed to do?” he whispered back. I unbuttoned his shirt further, resting my hand on his heart where it jumped under his skin, and then lower down to the scar I knew must be there. A welted mess disappearing under the waist of the his pants. I slid my hand under his waistband, and he shuddered. His hands trailed up my thighs, pulling aside the satiny blue robe I was still wearing. It felt like a second heart woke between my legs, answering his touch with its pulse.

He laid a trail of kisses from my collarbone to my nipples, and under each kiss my skin flowered, hot and cold at once.

“Is this what you want?” he asked. “Because if it isn’t…”

He didn’t need to finish. His voice had become ragged with desire, and I could feel how his body stirred with a life of its own under my hands.

“I want to _live,_ Kylo. I want _life,_ all of it.” _All the things the Force will never have,_ I thought.

He got up and locked the door.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A badly written sex scene would just kill this story, so I'm going to leave this right here. AO3 has plenty of superbly written erotica for you to find.


	41. The Way Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not everyone's a winner. Spikey and Finn, for instance....
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>  
> 
> * * *

“Stop it, Spikey!” Finn reached over and tried to pull her hands away from the chitarra. She was going up and down scales at blinding speed. She put the chitarra down. Practice kept her from thinking, but she couldn’t blame the others for having reached their limit. She’d been at it for hours. Finn had lost his hostility toward her, but she was in no hurry to test his patience.

“I think she does it when she’s upset,” said Poe.

“I’m not upset!” said Spikey. Poe stared pointedly at her feet, which had started kicking a tattoo against the table in the middle of the _Falcon’s_ crew lounge. She stopped.

“So, we won. We should be happy,” said Poe.

“Some people won more than others,” said Finn darkly. There was a heavy silence while they all thought of the door to Rey and Kylo’s bunkroom, firmly shut. As it had been most of the time since the day before, when Leia had come into the crew lounge, humming happily and looking smug.

“Don’t go barging into Rey’s room without knocking, will you?” she said. Spikey was sure Leia was looking especially at her and Finn. Luke jumped up and followed Leia out to the cockpit, arms swinging happily. He was out of his bacta patches at last. Leia said something inaudible and Spikey saw Luke punch the air triumphantly, laughing.

From then on the Force-users on the ship had kept to themselves. When Kylo and and Rey did emerge from their bunkroom, tired and glowing, they mostly talked to Luke and Leia.

A few times Spikey threw on her cloak of servant invisibility and went to offer them food, and torture herself in the process. She found the Skywalkers immersed in the sort of conversations families have when they have years of separation to make up. They remembered people they’d known and things they’d done together. Far from feeling left out by it, Rey seemed to be in a happy daze, fascinated by all the family history. There were dozens of people Kylo had lost track of in his years with the First Order, and Rey seemed just as interested as Kylo to hear Leia talk about them. Even though she’d never met any of them. Love did that for you, Spikey supposed.

They all called him Ben, except for Rey. Spikey wondered if she also found it odd to hear his true name spoken aloud, and preferred to hold it close, like a secret. Or perhaps Kylo _was_ his secret name now, the one he’d had when she and Rey met him. Soon he would be presented to the Resistance and the New Republic as Ben, the long-lost son who returned to the Skywalkers.

Spikey thought it was amazing how they could talk around the raw edges of Han Solo’s death. She would have thought his absence would put a strain on things, but evidently they had found a way to live with what Kylo had done. Love, again, in all its forms.

Kylo had avoided Spikey’s eye. She left silently went back to the crew lounge.

“Why are _you_ miserable?” Spikey asked Finn, after he called a halt to her angry chitarra playing. He didn’t reply, but Poe spoke up.

“He’s fancied Rey since forever.”

“Kark it Poe, you are the worst friend a man ever had,” muttered Finn.

“Well who wouldn’t fancy Rey? She’s beautiful,” Spikey said dismally. Finn looked at her intently and she blushed. _“I_ wasn’t…!”

“I thought she was pining for Kylo,” interrupted Poe. Finn aimed a kick at him.

“You never know when to shut up. Always just shut up, Poe. Listen to that little voice in your head when it tells you to shut up.”

“I don’t have that voice,” said Poe chirpily. Finn gave him a bitter look, and Poe went over to sit next to him, draping an arm over his shoulder. “Cheer up, man. Things are going to get better. Have you been listening to the news on the hypercomm?”

Leia had sent news of Snoke’s defeat almost as soon as the _Millennium Falcon_ had hit hyperspace, and the Resistance was broadcasting it far and wide. Spikey had been cynically waiting to hear the First Order deny it.

“No, what?” asked Finn.

“Peace talks! Not just the First Order, but a whole lot of places that have been at war for _years_ are discussing treaties.” Poe’s face creased with puzzlement. “It’s really strange, actually. It sounds like people are listening to each other for once.”

“You mean like a mass outbreak of niceness,” said Spikey. “I suppose you’re going to tell us plague deaths are down, and natural disasters too?”

“Well, they’re not in the news, no,” said Poe with a frown. “There’s a glaring lack of bad news all over.”

“And we’re claiming credit for all that?” said Finn.

“I’m happy to claim credit,” said Poe, grinning.

“We should ask Luke if it’s something to do with the Force,” said Spikey.

“It’d be nice if that was how the Force worked,” Finn said.

“It’s never been much bloody use before,” said Spikey morosely. But what if Finn was right? Her curiosity piqued at the thought, and she felt a little more cheerful.

Whatever happened, she’d have good stories to tell one day. The Force tried to eat Rey or turn her into a goddess, and maybe the result was that Rey made the Force a bit more useful around the place. How odd, and funny! It would be challenging to write a ballad to the triumph of niceness, but it was surprising what could work sometimes. Pleased at the thought, Spikey got up, stretching and twisting the kinks out of her shoulders and fingers.

“Tell you what, after dinner, let’s get out some of that Corellian brandy, and I will sing you my top ten tunes of love, heartbreak and adventure,” she said.

“Are they any good?” asked Poe.

“Well the Dathomirians didn’t like the love-songs. But I had people weeping into their drinks on Fariol.”

“Sounds like a perfect evening,” said Poe, laughing. He slapped hands with Spikey as she passed by him on her way to make herself happy with pots and pans in the galley.

 

 

 


	42. The End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Night in the City of Birds.
> 
>  
> 
> * * *

It is night in Montjau, the City of Birds. You could call it the City of Books too. Kylo never told me that, all those weeks when he was keeping me alive with his stories of life in the beautiful city. Montjau has not disappointed me. It is beautiful indeed, green and spacious and full of life. And also full of books, which is a good thing since I got a taste for libraries in the Jedi Temple. There’s a stack of reading beside me as high as the bed I’m lying on.

Kylo lies asleep beside me, his breath slow and even. The window of our apartment is open a crack to let in a little of the rain-wet air. I’m used to the street sounds now: pedestrians, their feet slishing through the puddles; tame wrist-owls calling to each other; quiet laughter and snatches of song, and the occasional whirr of hovercars. I can also hear the soft whine of the security droid outside our window, the only sign that we are any different to other people living on this block.

We decided to make Montjau our base between missions. Kylo never wanted to go back to the sterile corridors of shipboard life again, and although we both enjoy the activity and optimism of D’Qar these days, we are both frankly sick of life on a military base. Coruscant is no better: Leia spends half her time there, but Kylo and I dislike its stacked cityscapes and the endless round of politics and diplomacy. Communications between Fariol and Coruscant are easy, so we often talk to Leia on the imager instead.

If anyone asks, we say we’re couriers, and I suppose we are. We take Leia’s vision of peace to the parts of the Galaxy that haven’t heard it yet, and the Force helps us make people listen with an open mind. Empathy, tolerance — there wasn’t enough of it before. It’s surprising how many deep-seated hatreds dissipate when you help people walk in somebody else’s shoes for a while, and see a situation with their eyes. It’s a Force thing, and I can’t explain what we do better than that. Mostly people just see us carrying documents around the Galaxy — getting treaties signed and so forth.

Kylo goes openly as Ben Solo, son of Senator Organa, and the governments we work with seem to consider that an honour. It shows the New Republic is taking them seriously, if they send Ben Solo and his beautiful wife. The famous power couple who can more than handle themselves in a conflict. We’ve had to fight our way out once or twice, when things went wrong at some diplomatic summit, and that’s only added to his mana. People recognise a man with dangerous edges to him, a dark past. Part of him still Kylo underneath.

Kylo’s never denied who he was or what he did under Snoke’s rule. That is the only argument I have ever seen him have with Leia. Keeping secrets has never worked well for the Skywalkers, he says.

We’re free now. Though freedom means something different to each of us.

Somebody’s fumbling at the front door of the apartment. Kylo wakes. A few months ago he would have started out of sleep at any unexpected noise, reaching for a weapon. He doesn’t wake in fear any more. He’s healing, enough that I can walk into the bedroom in the middle of the night without setting off a flailing nightmare. I am as proud of helping him feel safe as I’ve ever been proud of anything. I know how terrible his dreams were, for years and years.

“It’s just Spikey,” I say, and he nods in the dark.

A moment later she comes in and sits on Kylo’s side of the bed, trailing the complex smell of the theatre: sweat, powder, burnt dust, make-up, alcohol, spices.

“You make a fortune?” he asks sleepily.

“Asks the man who never did a day’s paid work in his life,” says Spikey. She doesn’t know much about Kylo’s previous stay in Montjau, when people gave him food for toting boxes, or coins if they mistook him for a beggar. There’s a little part of him that won’t humble himself so much before her, though I know things would go more smoothly between them if he did.

“Anyhow, we weren’t doing it for money. It was a benefit concert for the new opera house,” she says. She, too, bears a burden of guilt, and this is what she does to atone for the people who died in her place.

“Uhuh. We thought you’d be home earlier.” _Just for once, you could be on time_ , he thinks, but I put a warning hand on him and he says nothing. Spikey is flighty that way. The best you can hope for is a message to say, sorry, but she’s met some friends, or there’s some amazing thing she has to see, and do we mind finding something out of the coldbox for dinner? Like tonight, for instance.

_She’ll make it up to us later_ , I tell him silently. Some feast, some friends, some music, something glorious that she’s found somewhere.

“I got together with Lissa and Andala after the show. They found some songs they wanted to try out. I think we’re sounding good together,” Spikey goes on.

“You always did, I thought,” says Kylo. In the dark I can hear his mouth move into a smile. One of the first things we did after we killed Snoke was to discover the secret way to the First Order’s Palace, at last. We took it over and threw it open to public spaceflight so the people trapped there could leave. That was the one and only time Spikey joined us on a mission. Afterwards her friends from the Palace’s Comfort Wing came back to Fariol with us. She’d sung and played with them often, back when they were slaves together.

“Oh, you’ll want to hear this right away,” I say, remembering something from our call to Leia earlier that day. “Leia’s wondering if you would like to do a tour of New Republic's military bases.”

“Oh! Yeah!” Spikey bounces on the bed with excitement, and we give up any hope of going back to sleep. “With Andala and Lissa? That would be perfect. Lissa can dance and do the chitarra when I’m singing.” She shakes her hair out. It’s wet. The dim light from the streetlights outside shine on the droplets and glitter from the theatre which shower onto the bed, making me sneeze. “Sorry!” she says.

“I’m sure she can scratch up the budget for that,” Kylo says, grinning. Spikey would do well, the troops would love her, her music would be a breath of fresh air to soldiers stuck in the boring grind of outpost duties. Anything that can put Spikey in Leia’s good books is fine by him …. Despite everything she did on Snoke’s base, Leia still doesn’t entirely approve of Spikey, and we’re getting tired of it.

“Go change. You smell of the theatre,” says Kylo. He doesn’t notice the faint hitch in Spikey’s mood, but I do. As an ex-slave, she’s hypersensitive to being ordered to do anything, especially by Kylo. But she goes off to splash around in the water-refresher.

Freedom is everything to Spikey. To Spikey, it’s the ability to say no, to tell people to fuck off without being beaten for it. Sometimes Kylo gets autocratic around her and she’ll get this look on her face. I call it “flattening her ears,” like loth-cats do when they’ve had enough of your bullshit. We can’t gang up on her or she’ll simply go. Sometimes she goes anyway, suddenly as sick of crowds and parties as she craved them before.

If I say I’m going to do something, I will do it to the very best of my ability. I will never let somebody down. Kylo is the same. He is my rock. But Spikey, you can’t rely on.

Kylo and Spikey could never be a couple. He’d use his powers to make her obey, and she wouldn’t have anything to fight back with, and she’d hate it. I’m the one who keeps the balance. I remember what it was like to have no say in anything. I could go anywhere I wanted on Jakku, but it was a prison all the same.

Spikey reminds us who we’re protecting on our missions for Leia. Ordinary people like her — though nobody is ordinary, really. Our apartment is awash sometimes with her friends, who are loud, argumentative, and witty. They sing, they sketch funny drawings and they gossip worse than the birds they carry around with them. They make us laugh while they swarm the kitchen to make meals for whoever happens to be there. I see Kylo looking at them all, amazed he could have gone from the cold corridors of the Finalizer to this. He says very little, but his dry humour seems to hit the mark with them whenever he does open his mouth.

Sometimes Spikey kicks everyone out because she needs to be alone to think or play. She needs the freedom to do that, too.

Freedom means something different to me. My whole life that I remember, I was stuck on a desert planet, and then I spent months on a lonely island, and months more on Snoke’s miserable asteroid. Now we own the _Millennium Falcon,_ and I live for the moments when I can take off and feel all the sky under my wings. All the stars in the Galaxy a sea of jewels for my ship to sail.

Even when we’re planetside, on a mission, sometimes I’ll look past the ceremonies and the talking heads, overcome by a thirst to explore whatever I can see out the windows, the crooked alleyways and shining towers of a new city. So many people to meet, so many ways of life!

Without Kylo to anchor me I’d spend too much time exploring. I feel how the clean snow aches to have my footprints across it. The mountains call me to climb them and find wide new lands on the other side. The grasses whisper to me. Tall, silent forests gather around the lakes that reflect them. The sea has a thousand shades of colour on every planet. I could travel forever.

Kylo travelled a lot as a child of his famous parents, and later Snoke sent him on journeys to some of the less pleasant corners of the Galaxy. Or sent him to ordinary planets in order to make life worse for the people living there.

There are plenty more places we can go and make good memories together, I always tell him.

Kylo keeps me focused: he wants to get missions over with so he can go home. Home to the safe nest Spikey’s made, filled with art and people and music and good food. And for me, home is wherever Kylo is. The Force-bond is like that; it couldn’t be any other way. Sometimes during our adventures, there’s barely time for a word or a glance between us, but we’re present for each other no matter what chaos is going on around us. Wherever we are, we dance together.

Spikey likes to hear about our travels but it’s a waste of time bringing her. She hates adventure and is always stressing about her work too much to enjoy the scenery. You can take her to some beautiful beach, and she’ll be panicking that it’s too humid for the chitarra, and she has to practice…

Now Spikey comes back in to the bedroom and wriggles under the covers next to Kylo. I reach across to take her hand. Her small hand in mine.

“You smell nice,” I say.

“I made a new soap with some herbs from the garden,” she says. “Want me to show you tomorrow?”

“Sure!” I say, smiling. I’ll enjoy a day messing about with Spikey in the garden. I collect plants and she finds things to make with them.

“I bet you’re glad now that you watered it while we were gone, then,” says Kylo, after an appreciative sniff of her hair.

“Yeah yeah. That reminds me, Finn sent a message while you two were away. He’s on Ahch-to again, and he’s sending you some of the flowers from there. Sun-gazers?”

“Yes, that’s right!” I say, delighted. “I’ll clear a spot for them.” Like many apartments in Montjau, ours forms part of a square around a big courtyard. I’d laid claim to most of it, since Leia owned the whole block.

“What are sun-gazers good for? I thought they were nothing much to look at,” says Spikey.

“They were the first flowers I ever saw in real life,” I tell her.

Kylo wakes up properly. “Yes! You were looking at them, one of the first times I spied on you through the Force-bond!”

“I remember!” I say.

“You were so amazed by them. I imagined how I’d like to cover you all over with flowers. All the flowers I could see in the Palace gardens, where I was then,” Kylo says, his voice soft.

“What, naked?” asks Spikey, with interest. Kylo laughed.

“Yes! Of course!”

“Just as well you managed to keep _that_ thought to yourself,” I say, laughing too. “I was _so_ not ready to hear that then!”

“We should do it!” says Spikey. “We’ve got masses of flowers in the courtyard.”

“How the other tenants would love that,” I say.

“Especially old Mrs Tsetsetse in the corner apartment,” says Spikey, sniggering.

“Young man, I can NOT approve….” starts Kylo in such a perfect imitation of Mrs Tsetsetse’s wheezy whine that Spikey and I choke up with laughter. Months of talking to Kylo along the Force-link had not prepared me for what a deadly mimic he was.

“Oh, and Mrs T was asking if she can grow kakadu fruit on the northern wall,” Spikey says when she can talk again.

“No! Those things stink when they’re ripe!” I say. The Force doesn’t help me love all my neighbours equally.

“Oh go on, what else has she got to look forward to in life?” asks Spikey.

“Especially when the younger generation are SO disappointing. Why, I could tell you…” whines Kylo in Mrs T’s voice. Spikey cackles and I laugh until I snort, which sets Kylo off with his deep, surprisingly goofy “Ha! Ha! Ha!” that shakes the bed.

Spikey changes the subject.

“How was Leia?”

“Fine,” says Kylo, but Spikey hears me sniff.

“What?” she asks. “Did she put her foot in it again?”

“Oh, you know Leia,” I say. “She just blunders into talking about Han and about Kylo’s childhood before thinking about it, you know? And suddenly Kylo’s feelings are hurt and she has no idea why.”

“It’s _BEN!”_ says Kylo, mimicking Leia’s exasperated voice. Now the world has gone back to calling him Ben, we’re the only ones who still call him Kylo, and of course it annoys Leia when we do it in front of her.

“It’s because she’s only interested the future. She won’t think about the past, so it trips her up. People’s feelings about the past, especially,” says Spikey. “It’s like she steps on her own landmines.” Kylo laughs rather bitterly and she wraps her arms around him for a sympathetic squeeze before curling up with her back to both of us. “Thanks for talking with her about the tour, anyway,” she says sleepily.

Kylo’s breathing slows. I don’t think he’ll sleep well tonight though. There is still that one dream that comes back to him. The one where he is building the cairn to his victims, stone by stone. It can never be high enough. I’ve been there and helped, in dreams.

I still dream of the trees bowing to me and whispering my name as I pass. Filled with gratitude to their deliverer, the one who gave them consciousness.

It’s hard to live with the choice I made. I murdered the Force just as it was on the cusp of becoming something. Maybe something great. Though with Snoke’s evil surrounding us, I suppose that was unlikely. Still, I killed it, and now we’ll never know.

Luke understands what I did, a little, but Kylo is the only one who knows what it feels like. It’s a shame we bear together. Because of what we did, I will never be able to look at the living things I love, the creatures and worlds and plants, and know that they love us back, through the Force. The living world will never embrace us in the kindness I dreamed of. Maybe even Snoke dreamed of that once, in his own sick way.

I don’t think I’d like to bear this on my own.

Spikey understands too. She’s lain alongside our nightmares long enough, and helped pull us out. The cairn of stones is as familiar to her as it is to us. She knows dreams, and she knows the long old songs of the light and dark, of life and love and the war against evil. I feel her wild bird mind working on our story, spinning it into some unimaginable music. When it’s ready she’ll sing it to us.

“They’ll sing it all over the Galaxy. You’ll see,” she says confidently. Kylo says she’s hoping my parents will hear it, wherever they are, and recognise the daughter they lost.

I don’t think so, somehow. My story is well enough known already; if they were out there somewhere, surely they would have come looking by now.

Other people might not understand the way we live, the three of us. But for me, all that matters is that once, we didn’t have enough love, and now we do. More love can only be a better thing.

I live by Leia’s advice: fill the hole in your soul with good people. They may be the only family you’ll ever have, so make it a good one.

I think this is a good one.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * * *
> 
>  
> 
> And there it is. Goodbye Kylo, Rey and Spikey. I have enjoyed the pleasure of their company while they lived in my head for six months, and I hope you have too.


End file.
